Police unleash close-range tear gas in the faces of protesters, some of whom were caught near a scuffle outside the Candaian National Assembly building in Quebec City. The protesters had gathered to voice opposition to government austerity policies…

March 24: Delhi police today brutally lathi charged and tear gassed hundreds of Delhi workers and students who had gathered at the Delhi secretariat to remind the Kejriwal govt about its promises. Scores of workers and activists, including women, have been badly injured, some of them have suffered serious head injuries. Several leading workers and activists have been arrested, including Abhinav, the editor of workers paper Mazdoor Bigul and Shivani, legal advisor of the Delhi Metro Contract Workers Union.
The workers have started assembling again near the Rajghat. We appeal to all friends in Delhi and among the media to reach there and defeat the conspiracy to black out these kind of repressions….

9 Year Old Dissects Standardized Tests in Fla (video inside) “This testing looks at me as a number. One test defines me as either a failure or a success through a numbered rubric. One test at the end of the year that the teacher or myself will not even see the grade until after the school year is already over. I do not feel that all this FSA testing is accurate to tell how successful I am. It doesn’t take in account all of my knowledge and abilities, just a small percentage.” — Sydney Smoot www.upworthy.com/a-9-year-old-goes-in-on-standardized-tests-and-ends-with-the-best-mic-drop-of-all-time?c=ufb1

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Ohanian on the Language and silences of Ed (from her book chapter): For years I have been distressed by the silence of university scholars on the devastating impact of federal education policy. Or when they do talk they talk past each other. For example, scholars who write books about NCLB and Race to the Top rarely mention capitalism or the corporate domination of education policy. And scholars who write books about capitalism rarely mention NCLB and Race to the Top or the insidious influence of the U. S. Department of Education. Since scholars in neither camp offer any practical advice to teachers, by and large, their books sell only to the college classes required to buy them. Table 1 provides a rundown on the topics that interest these camps.

Detroit Schools Retirement System Broke? Cash-strapped Detroit Public Schools could be $81 million behind on its mandatory state pension contributions by July 1 if the district does not resume full payments soon, state officials say.

Michigan’s largest school district has not made a payment since October, and has been building a delinquent balance with the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System since October 2010, said Kurt Weiss, spokesman for the state’s retirement services office.

During the past 51 months, 60 percent of the time the Detroit school district has been an average of $7 million behind on Michigan retirement system payments, according to state records. The district is incurring $7,600 a day in interest penalties and a $78,000 monthly fee for its delinquency, Weiss said.

Shocker! Bosses get paid a lot more than workers in CSU system! California State University administrators made significant gains in hiring and compensation over the last decade while faculty lost ground or failed to keep pace in both areas, according to a report released Tuesday by the California Faculty Assn.

The report, “Race to the Bottom: Salary, Staffing Priorities and the CSU’s 1%,” culled CSU payroll and budget data and found that over the last decade, the number of managers and supervisors systemwide grew 19% while the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty fell 3%.

The number of permanent faculty was reduced even as the student population increased 24% during that time, according to the report.

Its release comes as the faculty group hopes to reopen negotiations with the university on salary and benefits in May.

UC Student Association Won’t Take Napolitano’s crap UC president Janet Napolitano apologized Thursday for a crude remark she made the day before about student protesters who interrupted a regents meeting.

But the UC Student Assn. is not in a forgiving mood.

In a statement released Thursday night, the student organization said Napolitano’s private description, captured on video, of the protest as “crap” showed “a disturbing disconnect with the students she serves” and was a slap at free expression.

“Her role as president has given her the opportunity to be a true champion for students and the future of public higher education, but the comments she made point to disrespect for public expression of the student interest,” Jefferson Kuoch-Seng, president of the UC Student Assn., said in the statement.
“It takes a lot of courage to speak in public in front of figures of authority, and being vulnerable about concerns,” the statement continued. “To hear this come from the president of the University makes it even more challenging for students to come forward to share their thoughts with university administration, especially when it is accompanied by an intimidating police presence.”

U Mich Capitalist Business School to help Continue to organize the Decay of the Schools Detroit Public Schools is partnering with international experts from the UM Ross School of Business in a restructuring effort aimed at helping to transform the district’s business operations.

The UM school is offering its services for free.

“Michigan Ross shares a common bond with our colleagues of the Detroit Public Schools and that is our belief that a quality education is transformative,” Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said Monday in a statement. “We applaud DPS for making a commitment to ongoing leadership development and strategic planning for their future, and the future of their students, and are proud to offer our expertise to support this partnership.”

In a news release, DPS said the district has pledged to create “a high performance environment,” provide necessary resources and technology, use “comprehensive performance management” and promote behavior “that reinforces a lean, agile performance-driven culture.”

Maybe it was all about that rascal Henry An examination of the server that housed the personal email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used exclusively when she was secretary of state showed that there are no copies of any emails she sent during her time in office, her lawyer told a congressional committee on Friday.

After her representatives determined which emails were government-related and which were private, a setting on the account was changed to retain only emails sent in the previous 60 days, her lawyer, David Kendall, said. He said the setting was altered after she gave the records to the government.

“Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized,” Mr. Kendall said in a letter to the House select committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

The committee subpoenaed the server this month, asking Mrs. Clinton to hand it over to a third party so it could determine which emails were personal and which were government records.

Obamagogues’ Forever war In Afghanistan (just for drone strikes, you know) President Obama’s decision to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan through 2015 is partly designed to bolster American counterterrorism efforts in that country, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to conduct secret drone strikes and other paramilitary operations from United States military bases, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama on Tuesday announced that he would leave 9,800 American troops in Afghanistan until at least the end of the year. The announcement came after a daylong White House meeting with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan. The two men said the decision was a necessary response to the expected springtime resurgence of Taliban aggression and the need to give more training to the struggling Afghan security forces.

Barbarism rising; Wahhabi Monarcho Fascist US Ally Saudis bomb Competing Fanatics in Yemen Saudi-led coalition troops have bombed Houthi targets in Yemen for a third consecutive night, and claim to be in complete control of Yemen’s airspace.

The air strikes early on Saturday hit targets in the city of Hudaydah on the Red Sea Coast, the Houthi stronghold of Saada in the north, and military installations in and around the capital Sanaa.

The air strikes also struck the base of Yemen’s former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled the country for more than 30 years. Saleh is believed to have fled to Sanhan, near the capital.

The air strikes come amid reports of ground fighting between forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Houthi rebels in the southern port of Aden.

The spokesman for the Arab coalition bombing Houthi targets in Yemen, Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri, said that Saudi Arabia and its allies will do whatever it takes to stop Yemen’s second largest city from falling to the Shia rebels.

Asiri said in Riyadh on Friday that the coalition’s “main objective [is] to protect the government in Aden”.

Iran Backed Religious Fanatics Seize info on US Spy ops in Yemen (plus capital) while Saudi Wahabbi lunatics bomb them (can we say barbarism rising?) Secret intelligence files held by Yemeni security forces and containing details of American intelligence operations in the country have been looted by Iran-backed militia leaders, exposing names of informants and plans for U.S.-backed counter-terrorism operations, U.S. officials say.

U.S. intelligence officials believe additional files were handed directly to Iranian advisors by Yemeni officials who have sided with the Houthi militias that seized control of the capital of Sana last September and later toppled the U.S.-backed president.

For American intelligence networks in Yemen, the damage has been severe. Until recently, U.S. forces deployed in Yemen had worked closely with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to track and kill Al Qaeda operatives, and President Obama hailed Yemen six months ago as a model for counter-terrorism operations.

But the identities of local agents were considered compromised after Houthi leaders in Sana took over the offices of Yemen’s National Security Bureau, which had worked closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations.

Yemeni intelligence officers still loyal to Hadi’s besieged government burned some secret files, one official said. But they couldn’t destroy all of them before the Houthi forces, whose leaders have received some weapons and training from Iran, took control.

The loss of the intelligence networks, in addition to the escalating conflict, contributed to the Obama administration’s decision to halt drone strikes in Yemen for two months, to vacate the U.S. Embassy in Sana last month and to evacuate U.S. special operations and intelligence teams from a Yemeni air base over the weekend. The Houthis claimed Wednesday that they had captured that base, Anad, as new fighting broke out in and around the strategic seaport of Aden, the country’s financial hub, where Hadi had taken refuge. Over the weekend, the Houthis seized the central city of Taiz. www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-us-intelligence-yemen-20150325-story.html#page=1

Trillion $ Iraqi Forces Happy To Wait Behind US Bombing (again) and Iran’s fighters Here at the headquarters of Iraqi ground forces, after three days of American airstrikes that at times witnesses here described as “carpet bombing,” Iraq’s military seemed in no great hurry on Saturday to press its advantage.

It also seemed to be moving very slowly on promises to withdraw Shiite militias from the battlefield.

An Iraqi Air Force C-130 carrying 150 fresh militia volunteers, a dozen federal police officers, a few soldiers back from leave and two American journalists landed here late in the morning. Although the intensive bombardment of the night had eased, within half an hour two large explosions rattled the windows of the Salahuddin Operations Command building as bombs dropped by unseen aircraft brought satisfied smiles from the assembled military men.

Missing from this picture was any sense of urgency. The holdouts from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, who remain in the center of Tikrit are believed to number “about 400,” as one general here said. But the extremists have so far held off an offensive by an estimated 30,000 Iraqi troops and volunteer militiamen for nearly four weeks.

After refusing any American assistance, the Iraqi military formally requested it, and the American-led coalition began bombing on Wednesday, with explosions heard in the city as often as twice a minute at night. So far, at least, that has not spurred any Iraqi ground advance.

“There is a plan, and we are going as planned,” said Lt. Gen. Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq, the commander of Iraqi Army ground forces nationwide. “It’s a battle that’s going on right now,” he added. “We’re not in any hurry.”

Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

Mr. Obama’s fascination with an Iranian nuclear deal always had an air of unreality. But by ignoring the strategic implications of such diplomacy, these talks have triggered a potential wave of nuclear programs. The president’s biggest legacy could be a thoroughly nuclear-weaponized Middle East. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0

We’re Baaaack! US Bombs Tirkit as Trillion $ Iraqi Troops Look for help from Iran U.S. raids in support of a ground offensive on the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit were underway Wednesday, a senior U.S. official said, after Washington gave the green light to airstrikes to assist Iranian-backed Iraqi forces attempting to wrest the city from fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

“These strikes are intended to destroy ISIL strongholds with precision, thereby saving innocent Iraqi lives while minimizing collateral damage to infrastructure,” said Lt. Gen. James Terry, commanding general of the U.S.-led operation. He added: “This will further enable Iraqi forces under Iraqi command to maneuver and defeat ISIL in the vicinity of Tikrit.”

Prior to the airstrikes being confirmed, the Pentagon said the United States had started intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights over the besieged city.

Washington and Baghdad had been discussing possible American raids for days in a bid to revive a push against the extremists that had seemingly stalled.

San Diego is So Proud of Precision Bombing U.S. and coalition military forces — including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson from San Diego — continue to attack ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq, with 10 air strikes over a 24-hour period ending Saturday.

Forces from he United States and coalition partners have been carrying out attacks daily since last August as part of operation Inherent Resolve.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS or ISIL, seeks to set up a “caliphate” governing all Muslim countries in the Mideast, and has used brutal terrorist tactics.

Syria Shoots Down US Drone. US Says: Hey! Stop that! The US has warned Damascus not to interfere in its ongoing air campaign in Syria, after a US drone was shut down over the coastal province of Latakia. “We certainly continue to believe that that is what the Assad regime [sic] should do, which is not interfere with our ongoing efforts there as we deal with ISIL and some other extremists that may pose a threat to the United States and our interests around the world,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday.

“That — our insistence that they not interfere is — still applies,” he said.

On Tuesday night, Syrian media reported that the country’s air force had targeted a US surveillance jet over Latakia. The Syrian television also broadcast footage of the drone’s wreckage.

The US military confirmed that it “lost contact with a US MQ-1 Predator unarmed remotely piloted aircraft operating over northwest Syria.”

A senior US Defense Department official also warned Syria over the downing of the aircraft, USA Today reported.

Navy Fires another Commander The Navy fired the commander of an organization whose aircraft allow the president and the secretary of defense to directly contact the submarines, bombers and land-based missiles that comprise the nation’s strategic nuclear force.

A Navy statement said Capt. Heather E. Cole was relieved of her duties as commander of Strategic Communications Wing 1, based at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, for what it called a “loss of confidence” in her ability to lead.

A spokeswoman, Cmdr. Jeannie Groeneveld, said the firing was based on findings of an investigation into her management of the wing. Details were not released.

The advertisement – published under the title: “Letter to the people of the United States: Venezuela is not a threat” – also demands the cancellation of sanctions against seven senior law enforcement and military officials, accused by the US of corruption and human rights violations.

The order, issued last week, blocks the seven individuals – including Venezuela’s head of intelligence and a senior prosecutor – from entering the US, freezes their assets in the country, and prohibits US citizens from engaging in business with them.

The advert, published on Tuesday, frames the sanctions as an attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty.

Children of the poor killing other children of the poor, for the rich: Military Teen Suicides California adolescents from military families are more likely than non-military youth to think about, plan and attempt suicide, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Bar Ilan University in Israel.

Military-connected teens are also at a higher risk of requiring medical care because of a suicide attempt, according to the study, which appears in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Stiglitz: We’ve Been Brainwashed! (no There is no Left) The fact that the 1 percent has so successfully shaped public perception testifies to the malleability of beliefs. When others engage in it, we call it “brainwashing” and “propaganda.” We look askance at these attempts to shape public views, because they are often seen as unbalanced and manipulative, without realizing that there is something akin going on in democracies, too. What is different today is that we have far greater understanding of how to shape perceptions and beliefs — thanks to the advances in research in the social sciences.

It is clear that many, if not most, Americans possess a limited understanding of the nature of the inequality in our society: They believe that there is less inequality than there is, they underestimate its adverse economic effects, they underestimate the ability of government to do anything about it, and they overestimate the costs of taking action. They even fail to understand what the government is doing — many who value highly government programs like Medicare don’t realize that they are in the public sector.

In a recent study respondents on average thought that the top fifth of the population had just short of 60 percent of the wealth, when in truth that group holds approximately 85 percent of the wealth. (Interestingly, respondents described an ideal wealth distribution as one in which the top 20 percent hold just over 30 percent of the wealth. Americans recognize that some inequality is inevitable, and perhaps even desirable if one is to provide incentives; but the level of inequality in American society is well beyond that level.) www.salon.com/2012/06/14/weve_been_brainwashed/

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Japan Rearms Japan’s largest warship since World War II has just entered service. Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) took delivery on Wednesday of the Izumo, a helicopter carrier “as big as the Imperial Navy aircraft carriers that battled the United States in the Pacific.”

The Izumo was indigenously constructed at a shipyard in Yokohama, near Tokyo, at a cost of around $1.5 billion. It is named after the former Izumo province in western Honshu. In Japanese mythology, the entrance to yomi (hell) is located in Izumo.

Perhaps this is apt, as the ship’s capacities definitely have the ability to dispatch Japan’s foes. The Izumo displaces 19,500 tons and is 248 meters (814 feet) long. According to Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, the ship will improve the Japanese Self-Defense Forces’ capacity to deal with submarines: “As well as having the capacity to search for submarines itself, it will be able to deal with submarines over a larger area as it’s equipped with a lot of helicopters.”The ship can carry nine helicopters, in addition to 470 personnel. However, in theory, the ship can carry over twenty aircraft. According to reports, while the Izumo “does not have a catapult necessary to launch fixed-wing fighters, a planned vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) variant of the F-35 could fly from the Izumo’s flight deck.” This basically makes the Izumo—which gives Japan its largest naval flat surface since the Second World War—an “aircraft carrier in disguise.” nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/japans-navy-unveils-aircraft-carrier-disguise-12483

Solidarity for Never

NEA Warns Union Tops Against Us vs Them Mentality “Teachers can disengage from the union when meetings turn into yelling matches where site reps speak disparagingly about administration in a way that contributes to an adversarial ‘us vs. them’ culture. It is frustrating when union leaders appear to blanket all external support partners with suspicion and ill intent.” www.eiaonline.com/2015/03/23/rock-the-union/

UAW Bosses Prepare Ranks for Another Two-tier, no strike, save the auto bosses, contract At a press conference following the union’s two-day bargaining convention here, Williams said it’s important to bargain contracts that put each of the companies on the same competitive plane. That way, they can compete on the quality of their vehicles and customer satisfaction rather than on differing labor cost rates, he said.

Negotiating a pattern agreement across all three automakers will be difficult.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles enjoys about a $10-an-hour labor cost advantage over domestic rivals Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The main reason is that FCA uses a much higher percentage of entry-level Tier 2 workers than either Ford or GM. About 42 percent of FCA’s hourly U.S. work force is Tier 2, while it’s 29 percent at Ford and 20 percent at GM.

FCA has benefited from a 2009 pre-bankruptcy deal with the UAW that allowed it to suspend a cap on Tier 2 hiring at about 20 percent of its total work force.

With the cap gone and U.S. vehicle sales growing since then, FCA has hired several thousand workers, all of them under Tier 2 wage and benefit packages that are roughly half the compensation paid to veterans, or Tier 1 workers.

Unions are Trojan Horses, but Workers aren’t powerless the long-simmering dispute between West Coast port owners and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had already been settled, but everywhere I went at the International Home and Housewares Show, people were still talking about it. The standoff left ships sitting offshore, unable to unload their cargo, and snarled everyone’s supply chains into the kind of knot that you have to spend weeks in the basement untangling. Product launches were being delayed, and retailers were making nervous noises about empty shelves.

The showdown at the ports was very bad for the U.S. economy, which lost an estimated $2 billion a day as food rotted and ships idled. But it seems to be good for the port workers, though the details of the tentative agreement are somewhat scarce. Through solidarity and aggressive bargaining, the ILWU won higher wages and other concessions from an employer group that is not afraid to play hardball.

If you’re hoping that trade unionism can be resurrected in the U.S. — and along with it the high wage growth and lower inequality that characterized mid-century America — this might seem like a hopeful sign. In fact, it’s the opposite. The very factors that enabled the longshoremen to drive such a high bargain are the same factors that are killing unions and lowering wages for low- and medium-skilled workers in the rest of the economy; the ILWU’s victory just tells you how bad their bargaining position is.

Whither labor? The last year has been filled with interesting stories on this front: The United Automobile Workers union is still struggling to organize Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, despite the support of the company and its German unions; local governments are mandating massive hikes in the minimum wage supported by dubious readings of the available evidence; and meanwhile, the governor who won an epic showdown with Wisconsin’s public-sector unions may well be the next president of the United States. And did I mention that Wal-Mart, after spending years strenuously resisting pressure to raise wages, went ahead and announced generous increases? What the flaming heck is going on with our labor markets?

Well, let me see if I can boil it down for you:http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-23/unions-are-powerless-workers-aren-t-

Spy versus Spy

DEA, Hookers, Exploiters, and their Pals in the Cartels Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels in Colombia, according to a new inspector general report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.

In addition, Colombian police officers allegedly provided “protection for the DEA agents’ weapons and property during the parties,” the report states. Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of two to 10 days.

The stunning allegations are part of an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into claims of sexual harassment and misconduct within DEA; FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service. The IG’s office found that DEA did not fully cooperate with its probe….The Oversight panel is also investigating allegations into the Secret Service that agents there hired prostitutes in Colombia while advancing a trip for President Barack Obama….

The DEA “sex parties” in Colombia, though, are by far the most damaging allegations.

“The foreign officer allegedly arranged ‘sex parties’ with prostitutes funded by the local drug cartels for these DEA agents at their government-leased quarters, over a period of several years,” the IG report says.

Other allegations outlined in the report include:

* A deputy U.S. Marshal “entered into a romantic relationship” with a fugitive’s spouse and would not break off the relationship for more than a year, even after being told by supervisors to end it;

* An ATF “Director of Industry Operations” had “solicited consensual sex with anonymous partners and modified a hotel room door to facilitate sexual play.” The ATF employee even disabled a hotel’s fire detection system, and when caught by the hotel, said he had done it before;

* “For over 3 years, an ATF Program Manager failed to report allegations that two training instructors were having consensual sex with their students. According to the incident report, the Program Manager learned the same instructors had engaged in substantially the same activities 3 years earlier but had merely counseled the training instructors without reporting the alleged activities” to the Internal Affairs Division. more: www.politico.com/story/2015/03/dea-sex-parties-colombia-report-116413.html#ixzz3Vj44FQDC

The perpetual war machine…

Spy Vs Spy + Perpetual War Produces Weird Law Imagine that someone has wronged you, and you sue them. Then the government magically appears in court and asks that your suit be dismissed because, for reasons it won’t tell you, state secrets might be dredged up in the course of the litigation. You have no idea what they’re talking about. But after secret discussions with the judge from which both you and the defendant are excluded, the court dismisses your suit.

This Kafkaesque scenario couldn’t happen in the U.S., right? Not until Monday, it couldn’t. But a federal judge in the Southern District of New York just did exactly this, dismissing a defamation suit by Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis against a shady advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran.

This is the first time a U.S. court has dismissed a lawsuit on the basis of state secrets when the case didn’t involve either the government or a defense contractor deeply enmeshed with classified government contracts. It’s also a marvelous example of how secrecy fundamentally distorts the legal process and subverts the rule of law.

Usually when I write about a case, I begin by describing the facts. Here the facts are so secret I can barely say anything. United Against was founded in 2008 by a former CIA director and a group of retired diplomats to advocate against the nuclear Iran. Its board includes former directors of foreign intelligence services including the U.K.’s MI-6, Germany’s BND — and Israel’s Mossad.

One of the strategies pursued by United Against is a campaign to “name and shame” entities that trade with Iran. The organization named Restis, who in turn sued United Against for falsely claiming his companies were “frontmen for the illicit activities of the Iranian regime.”

The Department of Justice intervened in September, asserting the state secrets privilege. That so-called privilege doesn’t come from the Constitution or from statute. It’s an unwritten judicial rule that allows the government to block discovery of information through ordinary litigation “when disclosure would be inimical to national security,” as the district court described it.

What followed would be comical if it weren’t so serious. The government asserted privilege “by submitting classified declaration by the head of the department which has control over the matter.” But even the identity of that official is itself a secret that the court declined to reveal. The government said that “disclosing even the identity of the agency involved creates an unwarranted risk of exposing the information it seeks to protect.”

The Mind/Body Split in the Spy Agencies: FBI and CIA While bureau officials have long extolled the importance of intelligence analysts, the report, by the F.B.I. 9/11 Review Commission, found that the bureau “still does not sufficiently recognize them as a professionalized work force with distinct requirements for investment in training and education.” The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, acknowledged the problem and said that empowering analysts was one of his main goals.

IS Pal in Michigan heads to court Ahmad Jebril, a Dearborn cleric popular with ISIS fighters from the West, is scheduled to be in court today in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

Jebril was to appear as the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit tries to pressure him to answer questions about his finances, concerned that he might be getting money illegally. On Twitter and Facebook, Jebril’s supporters urged today people to pray for him as he makes his court appearance.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit said in recent court filings that Jebril, 43, a religious leader with an international following, is deliberately not complying with the terms of his probation in his fraud case and misleading authorities about the sources of his money and assets.

Jebril was convicted in 2005 on 42 counts of financial fraud, served 61/2 years in prison and was released in 2012 with three years of probation that ends March 30. He owes more than $250,000 in restitution, of which he has paid $3,080, according to a court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors said in a court filing last month that if Jebril doesn’t provide answers, he should be held in contempt of court.

Victims Say Pope Should Oust Chilean bishop We applaud the two victims on the pope’s abuse panel who are speaking out against the promotion of a corrupt prelate. We call on Francis to reverse himself and out the Chilean bishop he just appointed.

Marie Collins and Pete Saunders are expressing concern over the elevation of Bishop Juan Barros who faces credible allegations of witnessing and concealing child sex crimes by Fr. Fernando Karadima.

Rewarding wrongdoers encourages wrongdoing. In some ways, this pope differs from his predecessors. But with clergy sex abuse and cover up cases, he differs little. Francis is way more adept at saying the right things about predator priests and complicit bishops. But he steadfastly refuses to do the right things about them.

Actions matter, not words. And kids are endangered when those who ignore or hide child sex crimes are promoted. Barros’ elevation essentially signals to victims that their pain doesn’t matter to the church hierarchy and to bishops that protecting predators is still valued by the church hierarchy. www.snapnetwork.org/vatican_victims_say_pope_should_oust_chilean_bishop

Mexico: Farmworkers Fight Back Again–and the state attacks Farmworkers protesting working conditions at Mexican export farms in Baja California blocked a major highway and occupied several government buildings as officials scrambled to quell a widening strike that threatens one of Mexico’s most valuable harvests.

Wednesday morning authorities said they had reopened the Transpeninsular Highway after dispersing crowds and arresting dozens of protesters, but the situation remained tense with hundreds of police and Army soldiers descending on the region bracing for more protests.
The laborers are demanding higher wages and government-required benefits that they say have been denied to them for years. They are targeting about a dozen agribusinesses that supply major U.S. retail and restaurant chains.

Government and business officials, they say, have refused to address their concerns. “Nothing is resolved, and now things are getting hot,” said Faustino Hernandez, a farmworker from San Quintin. ..About 30,000 people work in the agricultural fields in the coastal region of San Quintin, about 200 miles south of San Diego. It is one of Mexico’s leading agricultural export regions, shipping tons of strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers annually to the U.S. www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-baja-farmworkers-20150318-story.html

Vimeo: Police Attack CCSF Students–March 13 vimeo.com/89070212As City College of San Francisco (CCSF) students held their sit-in to demand the resignation of dictator Bob Agrella, police attacked them. At least one woman was thrown to the ground and police held a man on the ground and punched him.

The one-man rule of Special Trustee Bob Agrella has been a disaster for CCSF students. Agrella and his administration have cut classes, while trying to give administrators a 19% pay raise; they have imposed a Payment Plan that discriminates against immigrant students, while decimating the Diversity Departments; they continue to push the policies of the illegitimate ACCJC accreditation commission, even though the courts have issued an injunction against it. Students demand Agrella’s immediate resignation, the reversal of his anti-student actions, and the democratic election of a new Board of Trustees.

More than 1,000 students in India were expelled this week for openly cheating on highly important 10th and 12th grade exams. Since the Bihar School Examination Board tests started Tuesday, hundreds of students have smuggled in textbooks, used WhatsApp to text about the questions and caught answer sheets folded into paper airplanes, the Gulf News reported. Although cheating is not unusual in Bihar, India’s least literate state, the scandal went viral after local media published photos of parents climbing school walls to help their kids pass.

O and btw, the education agenda is a war agenda: class and empire’s wars. Who is running the Tx system?

Homeland Security’s Nazi Napolitano Doesn’t want to listen to student “crap” (video within) University of California President Janet Napolitano apologized Thursday for referring to a student protest as “crap” during a meeting of the UC regents a day earlier in San Francisco. Her comment to regents Chairman Bruce Varner was captured on the university’s video stream.

“I was caught on a mike with a word that was unfortunate. So I want to just say I apologize for that,” Napolitano said at the start of the final day of the three-day regents meeting at UC’s Mission Bay campus.

Napolitano made her original remark when a few dozen student protesters got loud at Wednesday’s regents meeting.

The students were protesting not only the tuition hike set for next fall, but a new campus in Richmond being planned by UC Berkeley. The students had urged the regents to ensure that residents in the low-income community benefit from jobs and any new housing that result from the campus, which is still years from breaking ground.

In the video, students had just called “mike check!” to announce their protest action. Some stood on chairs, stripped off their shirts and tossed fake money while yelling at the regents: “Raise up Richmond! Not tuition!”

As UC police faced the protesters to escort them out of the meeting, the video camera recording the meeting focused on Napolitano and Varner to her left.

The president turned to Varner and said, “Let’s go.” Varner couldn’t hear her over the students’ chanting, so she repeated: “Let’s go. We don’t have to listen to this crap.”http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/UC-Prez-Janet-Napolitano-apologizes-for-calling-6145619.php

Congratulations on the publication of:

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Teach the Commune!

Capitalist Community College District Sucks up to Saudi Wahhabi Fascists Rancho Santiago Community College District will continue its consulting agreement with two Saudi Arabia technical colleges despite opposition from some faculty members who say the deal violates the district’s values of equality and tolerance.

Chancellor Raúl Rodriguez said during Monday’s board of trustees meeting that working with the Saudi campuses does not mean the district, which operates Santiago Canyon College and Santa Ana College, endorses the Arab government’s record on human rights.

“I personally find a lot of the things that I’ve read about – they’re horrible, even barbaric by our standards,” he said. “At the same time, I’m an educator. We can, in a small way, contribute to helping set the conditions in that country for change.”

99 Percent of Louisiana kids take Common Corpse About 99 percent of Louisiana’s eligible public school students took Common Core-aligned tests Monday (March 16), Education Superintendent John White said. He called the participation rate an “unqualified success” and said, “Today’s assessment gives preliminary indications that concerns about widespread non-participation did not bear out.”

Those concerns circulated for weeks, and were aired at a state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting this month. The board put off voting on a measure to ensure that school performance scores don’t suffer because of students boycotting the test, after White urged waiting for more participation data.

Students are not penalized for skipping the tests, but they are recorded as scoring 0 for their schools and school systems, which affects school performance scores. These scores determine whether schools and systems continue to operate without state intervention or closure.

Four Suicides at MIT the suicides of four students within the past year — including two this month — have prompted fresh soul-searching among students, administrators, and faculty about stress and how to tame it at a college that, statistics suggest, has an above-average rate of students taking their own lives. Among the efforts: MIT is encouraging students to talk about the psychological phenomenon called “impostor syndrome,” a frequent feeling of being a failure despite a record of accomplishment. Students’ battle against stress is reflected in a new Twitter hashtag circulating around campus: #peoplebeforePsets, or “people before problem sets.” www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/mit-students-open-about-stress/dS61oA5tiKqjvVsJ5VZRAL/story.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Obamagogues’ Empire’s Troops to Remain in Afghanistan (until the empire ends) The Obama administration is nearing a decision to keep more troops in Afghanistan next year than it had intended, effectively upending its drawdown plans in response to roiling violence in the country and another false start in the effort to open peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

As recently as last month, American officials had hoped that a renewed push to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table would yield the beginnings of a peace process and allow the United States to stick with its plan to drop the number of troops in Afghanistan from just under 10,000 to about 5,600 by the end of the year.

But those hopes have been dashed by signs that the Taliban remain deeply divided over whether to engage in talks, as they have been for years, and that the remaining Qaeda presence in the region is proving more resilient than officials had anticipated.

As a result, Afghan and American officials are girding for another year of bloody fighting with the insurgents. Senior Obama administration officials broadly concluded during meetings over the last week that many of the roughly 10,000 troops and thousands of civilian contractors in Afghanistan would be needed well into 2016, officials said.

Pillar of the Farcical Arab Spring, Tunisia, unraveling The Islamic State and other extremists on Thursday sought to claim responsibility for the deadly attack that killed at least 21 people at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis. The authorities there arrested at least nine people suspected of being accomplices as major cruise lines indefinitely suspended stops in Tunisia, a sign of the looming toll on the crucial tourist industry.

The assault was the latest evidence that the extremist victories and cruelties in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are emboldening like-minded militants to acts of violence around the world — including recent attacks in Paris, Ottawa and Sydney, Australia.

Who Lost Yemen? IS attacks Sana Mosques The Islamic State’s “Sana’a Province” in Yemen claimed credit for the coordinated suicide attacks at two Houthi mosques in the capital today. More than 100 people were killed in the first major operation by the Islamic State inside Yemen.

The suicide attacks were claimed by the “Media Office of Sana’a Province,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

The Islamic State said that four “knights of martyrdom wearing explosive belts” attacked the Badr and Hashush mosques in Sana’a, “and blew up the headquarters of their polytheism.” Additionally, the Islamic State claimed another suicide attack against “another den of theirs in Sada’a.”

The jihadist group threatened further attacks against the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that is backed by Iran. The Houthis seized control of Sana’a and ousted the government of President Hadi last summer.

Billionaire Parasitical Philanderer with bad Genes in DC Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla played tourist on their first full day of their Washington visit on Wednesday, visiting several historic landmarks.

And Charles the organic farmer got to do something in his wheelhouse: explore George Washington’s Pioneer Farm at Mount Vernon.

There, he got up close and personal with a pair of chestnut-colored oxen, Jack and Jed, placidly chewing their cud (or whatever it is oxen chew), adorned with evil-looking horns.

“Is he friendly?” he inquired of the oxen keeper, dressed in 18th-century garb like most of the staff at the historic home of the nation’s first POTUS. “Oh, very friendly,” came the response as Charles patted the ox’s head.

“You’ve got to watch these,” Charles said, referring to the horns.

Behind Charles, a posse of photographers and reporters recorded everything

Brainwashed about Inequality? No. Just Deranged. The fact that the 1 percent has so successfully shaped public perception testifies to the malleability of beliefs. When others engage in it, we call it “brainwashing” and “propaganda.” We look askance at these attempts to shape public views, because they are often seen as unbalanced and manipulative, without realizing that there is something akin going on in democracies, too. What is different today is that we have far greater understanding of how to shape perceptions and beliefs — thanks to the advances in research in the social sciences.

It is clear that many, if not most, Americans possess a limited understanding of the nature of the inequality in our society: They believe that there is less inequality than there is, they underestimate its adverse economic effects, they underestimate the ability of government to do anything about it, and they overestimate the costs of taking action. They even fail to understand what the government is doing — many who value highly government programs like Medicare don’t realize that they are in the public sector.

Water Shutoffs Resume for nearly 150,000 in Detroit The Detroit water department is prepared to hang about 800 shutoff notices a day on doors across the city, a department official said Thursday.

The water department plans to start hanging the shutoff notices at homes of delinquent residential accounts beginning sometime in mid- to late-April, …This time last year, more than 150,000 of the city’s 323,900 DWSD accounts were delinquent.

Beverly Hills Bakery Workers paid two dollars an hour The workers said that for months they were paid as little as $2 an hour to do cleaning and landscaping work at the Rolling Hills Estates home of Ana Moitinho de Almeida and her husband, Goncalo. The workers say they slept on the floor of the laundry room.

They say they were also forced to work up to 17-hour days at the bakeries for less than minimum wage and no overtime pay. One worker was paid only $100 for a month’s work, according to the lawsuit.

Victims of US Gitmo War Crimes Struggling in Uruguay Dhiab is a Syrian, and he spent 12 years in Guantanamo. Now he lives in Montevideo with three other Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian, all former prisoners at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba. In a week’s worth of long and candid conversations, he acknowledged that the transition to life in a Latin American capital has not been easy.

The first days of feel-good images — the spruced-up men waving from their balcony, welcoming neighbors bringing gifts of yerba mate — have given way to a more uncomfortable limbo. It’s been hardest on Dhiab. The marks of a dozen years in a cell and the hunger strikes he held there show in his gaunt 43-year-old frame, his beard flecked with gray. He hobbles around on crutches, still wearing the Army green T-shirt and sweat pants given to him in Guantanamo. The infamous orange uniform — a Bob Barker brand 65-35 poly-cotton blend made in El Salvador — hangs in his closet for safekeeping.

While free — in theory — to leave Uruguay, the men do not yet have passports. Dhiab hardly ever goes outside now. He feels the promises made to him have been betrayed. He wants his own house, his family brought from Syria, enough money to live with dignity and start a business. He demands that the United States own up to its responsibility for having imprisoned him without charge for more than a decade, finally releasing him with a letter from the State Department saying there was no information he or any of the other men had any role in “conducting or facilitating terrorist activities.”

San Diego Media Execs are Bullshit, so say the reporters “The people who should be here are [U-T San Diego publisher] Doug Manchester or [NBC 7 San Diego president and general manager] Dick Kelly” and other execs, said NBC 7 senior producer Paul Krueger, who had joined with J.W. August and CBS 8’s David Gotfredson to raise money for a legal bid to unseal warrants in the McStay family slayings.

Krueger, Gotfredson and August — formerly of KGTV-10News but now with NBC as an investigative producer — told the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists how they laboriously contacted dozens of media outlets, raising $300 from each to pay for the discounted services of Kelly Aviles, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition.

Despite collecting about $14,000 from local affiliates, national networks and even CNN, they failed to unseal the warrants.

But the threesome honored at a Hillcrest bar during Sunshine Week didn’t seal their lips when it came to discussing news media responsibilities. “The fact that it took us countless hours to cobble together a group of media outlets willing to put out $300 each — which is what media executives pay for lunch — is to me an embarrassment,” Krueger told the 35-person gathering at The T Lounge.

Michigan EA Boss Gets Rich, and Richer, as a dues eater Here’s something you probably didn’t know — the president of the state’s largest teachers union is headed toward a pension fit for a one-percenter thanks to a sweetheart deal he enjoys with the state teacher retirement system.

If that sounds a little odd, that’s because it is. Steven Cook, who’s headed the Michigan Education Association since 2011, hasn’t worked directly for the Lansing School District for two decades.

Yet Cook maintains an arrangement with the school district, and through that agreement, he still contributes to the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System. Last year, the Lansing district contributed $51,976 to the system on behalf of Cook, even though he has no official responsibilities in the district. The MEA reimburses the district for the unusual provision that allows Cook to collect a much larger pension than he would otherwise get.

No surprise, Cook makes a whole lot more now as president of the teachers union than he did as a paraprofessional with the district. The payments the MEA contributes to the system now on his behalf are far greater than what he once made and have served to nicely plump his pension benefit.

According to the MEA’s LM-2 report, which unions file with the U.S. Department of Labor, Cook made a comfortable $203,144 in 2014. The average public school teacher in Michigan earns about $55,000.

A lawyer who had represented the Pakistani doctor who helped the C.I.A. hunt Osama bin Laden was shot dead Tuesday in northwestern Pakistan, the local police said.

The lawyer, Samiullah Afridi, was attacked in Peshawar by two men on a motorbike. A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban known as Jamaatul Ahrar claimed responsibility.

He was part of a panel of lawyers who had represented Dr. Shakil Afridi, his fellow tribesman whose conviction by a tribal court in 2012 was seen as punishment for his role in a fake vaccination scheme that he organized at the behest of the C.I.A. in 2011.

On God’s Banker Think of medieval popes waging the Crusades — raising armies, sacking ­cities and conquering territory — in the name of Jesus Christ. Or prelates torturing apostates and heretics during the Inquisition. Or Pope Pius V expelling Jews from the Papal States in 1569. Or Pope Pius XI signing the Reichskonkordat with ­Hitler, which, in return for winning a measure of freedom for German Catholics ­under the Nazis, assured silence from the Holy See over the forced sterilization of 400,000 people and then only the faintest of ­objections to the Holocaust. Or more ­recently, bishops and other church officials concealing widespread and repeated child sexual abuse by priests.

All of these and many other well-known acts of complicity with the ways of the world are touched on in Gerald Posner’s new book, but its main subject is a somewhat more arcane form of corruption. “God’s Bankers” provides an exhaustive history of financial machinations at the center of the church in Rome, from the final decades of the 19th century down to Pope Francis’ sincere but as yet inconclusive efforts to reform the church’s labyrinthine bureaucracy (the Curia) and the Vatican Bank (named Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or Institute for the Works of Religion, also known as the I.O.R.).

That the Vatican has a bank at all is surprising when taking in the long view of church history. During the Middle Ages, the papacy developed into an aristocratic and feudal institution dependent for much of its income on rents and taxes collected in the Papal States of central Italy. This came to an abrupt end with the final unification of Italy in 1870, which deprived the church of its lands and feudal income, leading to several decades of acute financial insecurity.

Anti-Racist Protests Continue in Ferguson, Madison Protesters gathered near the Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters and chanted slogans like “the whole damn system is guilty as hell” in what appeared to be a peaceful demonstration one night after two police officers were shot.

Seniors Vote for Prom-unism They’re calling it “prom-munism.” Seniors at an Albuquerque school want their prom to have a Communism theme. Seniors at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School near I-25 and Paseo del Norte voted online this week for the theme of their prom this year.

“They wanted prom-munism, so that’s what got voted for the most,” said senior Sarah Zachary.

She voted for “A Night in the Reef,” because the prom is expected to take place at the Albuquerque Aquarium on April 25.

“We have a lot of jokesters in our grade, so they wanted it to be funny and a lot of them are really intense with politics,” Zachary said.

However, students who asked to remain anonymous don’t believe Communism is a joking matter.

“I would hope Cottonwood would realize the seriousness of having a very powerful and destructive idea as the theme for a prom,” one student wrote.

Another said, “While the seniors meant no harm in their choice of theme, it is not appropriate.”

“Our students are in the International Baccalaureate program, so they are very academically focused,” said Sam Obenshain, executive director at Cottonwood. “One of the classes they enjoy the most is a world history class.”

Obenshain said, despite the vote, this is not a done deal. He said he plans to talk with the students about it next week.

“We want to make sure we honor the students’ voices but at the same time we use this as a learning experience for them,” Obenshain said.

Support Grows for UC Irvine ant-nationalists more than a week after the vote, students and faculty at UC Irvine are beginning to raise their voice over the angry condemnation of the students who created a national stir with their vote. A petition signed by hundreds from universities statewide said the aggressive and sometimes shrill response to the resolution embodies the exact aspects of nationalism the six had hoped to eliminate — racism, xenophobia and intimidation. www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-0313-uci-flag-20150313-story.html

Maduro May Come to the US to Challenge Obamagogue Ridiculing the U.S. qualification of Venezuela as a security threat, President Nicolas Maduro said on Thursday he may travel to Washington to challenge American counterpart Barack Obama.

“We demand, via all global diplomatic channels, that President Obama rectify and repeal the immoral decree declaring Venezuela a threat to the United States,” Maduro said.

In the worst flare-up between the ideological enemies since Maduro took power in 2013, Washington earlier this week declared a “national emergency” over “the unusual and extraordinary threat” from Venezuela and sanctioned seven officials over allegations of rights abuses and corruption.

Families of Mexico’s 43 Missing Students in US Relatives of 43 students who disappeared last year in Guerrero, Mexico, are scheduled to visit Houston next week as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the case.

“The purpose of this visit is for the Mexican government to know that they (the families) are getting support from other countries,” said Pamela Martinez, spokeswoman of The People’s Assembly of Houston, an organization created in November following a Houston rally about the disappearance of the students.

Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval,a representative of the group of relatives, said in a written statement: “It’s important that both residents and government leaders from other countries know the injustices (occurring) in Mexico.”

Fat Bonus for Detroit Emergency Manager Detroit Public Schools’ third emergency manager left the job with something his predecessors did not: a hefty bonus from the state, totaling $50,000.

The Michigan Department of Treasury gave Jack Martin the performance bonus in two payments — the first for $23,000 in 2013, and the second for $27,000, which went out around the time he stepped down in mid-January from his 18-month tenure. The total was the maximum amount outlined in his contract.

Reactionary Eagle Forum easily joins Liberal-Nationalist Opt Out Movement Americans are waking up to how bad Common Core really is for education, but its nightmare does not go away quickly. Liberal education bureaucrats (“educrats”) are now trying to enforce Common Core through the courts, with one lawsuit already filed in Oklahoma, and another likely in Louisiana.

In both states the governors tried to get rid of Common Core, but parents are shocked that it may return by court order as unelected educrats claim they have more power than the state legislature and the governor combined. The Oklahoma legislature approved a law to repeal Common Core and the governor signed it, but now its state board of education has filed a lawsuit to bring it back www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/common-core-becomes-a-nightmare.html

Detroit’s Renaissance High May Lose the Music Program A premier Detroit high school that attracts students from all over the metro area is in jeopardy of losing one its signature programs.

Cuts to Detroit Public Schools are forcing schools districtwide to reduce staff. At Renaissance High School, that may mean the loss of its music program.

Jody Childress, president of Renaissance’s parent group, said school administrators informed her that district cuts will mean an end to the school’s fine arts curriculum and could result in teachers having as many as 43 students per classroom this fall.

Childress said she was told that the dance and band instructors retired at the end of the last school year and will not be replaced.

“You’re taking away scholarship opportunities,” she told the Free Press Wednesday after the first day of new-student orientation at the high school on the city’s west side. “It’s terrible what they’re doing to these schools.”

Steve Wasko, spokesman for Detroit Public Schools, confirmed that cuts are happening at several schools around the district, including Renaissance, much of which is related to new class-size and enrollment numbers, from which state revenue is determined. He said he did not have specific information on Renaissance readily available Wednesday afternoon. archive.freep.com/article/20140821/NEWS01/308210056/Renaissance-High-School-teacher-cuts

LAUSD Distributes 609 Layoff Notices (add in all those sub cutbacks) The Los Angeles Unified School District Board, facing a nearly $160 million budget deficit, will consider authorizing layoff warning notices for 609 teachers, counselors and social workers at its board meeting Tuesday.

Included on the proposed list are more than 260 adult education teachers, 59 counselors, dozens of foreign-language teachers and 63 psychiatric social workers.

Pearson Isn’t a Spy Agency, they’re just keeping track of property Bob Braun, an education blogger and former journalist, got ahold of a note from a school superintendent advising parents in the district that a student in NJ had tweeted outside of school hours about a PARCC test he had completed earlier when school was still in session.* (The exact contents of the tweet are unknown now.)

Pearson, a multinational corporation which monitors its brand on Twitter for reputation defense and intellectual property rights violations, saw the tweet and contacted the New Jersey Department of Education which then reached out to the superintendent of the school district where the child attends. Pearson labeled this a “Priority 1 alert” breach of the confidential nature of the test’s contents and the NJDOE instructed the superintendent to have the student remove his tweet and he complied.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the official US War on Vietnam,which began long before. The US still moves to destroy the “Vietnam Syndrome, that is, the truth about the imperialist war on Vietnam that the US lost. Below are resources:

above, two of dozens of GI underground newspapers, featured in Sir, No Sir, youtube below

“THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious…

“To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.

“They have set up separate companies,” writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, “for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don’t even put on their uniforms any more… The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key…There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion.” Can all this really be typical or even truthful? Unfortunately the answer is yes. “Frag incidents” or just “fragging” is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield’s MontIn some cases, however, sexual freedom became license: sexual exploitation.ana was fragged in his sleep) th/spane Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96). Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.…” (Colonel Heinl) msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html#

above, one of the better basic texts on the wars

Vietnam, Year of the Pig, is one of the better films about the Vietnam Wars, as is Sir, No Sir, below

Klare: Obama’s Drive for More Imperialist War Of the many enduring lessons of the Vietnam War, none, perhaps, is more relevant today than avoiding what Yale historian Paul Kennedy termed “imperial overstretch”—or an excessive reliance on military force to protect a far-flung and often unruly web of alliances and commitments. For many who observed or fought in that war, America’s defeat was due less to the flawed strategies of US generals than to the overextension of American power in a place of questionable strategic significance and with minimal support at home. For a time, it appeared that US policy-makers were determined to avert more Vietnam-like fiascos; but now, as in the George W. Bush era, Washington seems headed toward another foolhardy increase in military activism abroad.

March marks the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of main-force US troops into Vietnam, making this a perfect moment to reflect on the war and its long-term consequences. In this issue, former Nation editor George Black examines one of those consequences: the ongoing legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is promoting its own interpretation of Vietnam, via an interactive timeline. After criticism from many scholars, who said it distorted the war’s history and character, the Pentagon backed off on some aspects of its new history.

What is most striking in all this, however, is that many in Washington now seek to embrace the same misbegotten logic that produced the Vietnam debacle in the first place: a belief that America should confront hostile forces wherever they arise, primarily through military action.

As the Vietnam War was ending, US leaders sought to ensure that such myopia would not prevail again by adopting a series of measures—including the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the establishment of an all-volunteer army—aimed at constraining the war-making ability of future presidents. By requiring the president to secure congressional approval for all future troop deployments, it was believed, the White House would engage in fewer ill-advised military engagements abroad; by eliminating the draft, the Pentagon presumably would be forced to pick and choose among overseas commitments, rather than embracing them all. (This was before the policy of multiple redeployments was adopted, which produced the mental and physical traumas experienced by so many US soldiers.) …

In response to all this pressure, accentuated by the media frenzy over public beheadings by ISIS, Obama is suppressing his noninterventionist instincts and moving toward a more assertive military posture. He has commenced an air war against ISIS and signaled a willingness to extend the US military mission in Afghanistan. The administration is also stepping up military aid to pro-Western rebels in Syria and considering the delivery of battlefield weapons to the Ukrainian military. Obama’s newly chosen secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, is vigorously campaigning to overcome Congressional restraints (known as sequestration) on higher military spending.

To cap all this off, Obama has asked Congress to approve a new authorization to use military force, or the new AUMF. This one is aimed at ISIS, and would give the president the power to use military force as “necessary and appropriate” to degrade and defeat that entity. Unlike the first two AUMFs, however, it sets certain limits on military action: a time limit of three years,

The Dubious Money? For the Good of the Good Ole Navy A Navy commander fighting bribery charges in the still-unfolding “Fat Leonard” scandal outlined his defense in court documents last week, saying the operational decisions he made were not the result of alleged bribes but were made for the good of the Navy. Michael Misiewicz is among numerous former and current Navy members and employees charged in the long-ranging bribery scheme, and is the one of the last to continue to contest the charges. Five have pleaded guilty for their roles in the quid-pro-quo scandal, as well as “Fat” Leonard Glenn Francis, the contractor at the center of the investigation, and one of Francis’ cousins.

Misiewicz, who managed operations on the Blue Ridge, flagship of the Seventh Fleet, is accused of diverting ships to numerous Southeast Asian ports owned by Francis’ company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, in exchange for luxury hotel rooms, travel expenses and prostitutes. The company provides trash removal, security and water and other services to visiting ships.

Misiewicz was initially charged in September 2013 and was indicted in January on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery.

In a motion for discovery filed Friday in San Diego federal court, Misiewicz’s lawyers argue he “did not act ‘corruptly’.”

“Rather, consistent with his 28 years of dedicated, meritorious service, each and every official act by Commander Misiewicz was taken in his belief that it was in the best interest of the Navy,” the motion reads.http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/mar/13/misiewicz-defense-navy-bribery-fat-leonard/?xtor=-[Newsletter%20-%20Daily%20News%20%2810%29%2003/14/15%2007:00%20AM]–[]-[NTYyOTMyNjgxMTMS1]–

The US as AQ’s ATM In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.

They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.

Photo

Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who was kidnapped by Al Qaeda in 2008.Credit Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”

The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting. While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Bloomberg Surprise: US Economy Sucks Eggs It’s not only the just-released University of Michigan consumer confidence report and February retail sales on Thursday that surprised economists and investors with another dose of underwhelming news. Overall, U.S. economic data have been falling short of prognosticators’ expectations by the most in six years.

The Bloomberg ECO U.S. Surprise Index, which measures whether data beat or miss forecasts, fell to the lowest since 2009, when the nation was in the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

There’s been one notable exception to the gloom, and it’s a big one: payrolls. The economy added 295,000 jobs in February and 1.3 million over four months, a reflection of a healthier labor market in which the unemployment rate has fallen to the lowest in almost seven years.

Most everything else? Blah.

This month alone, personal income and spending, manufacturing as measured by the Institute for Supply Management, auto sales, factory orders, and retail sales have all come in a bit weak.

Citigroup keeps economic surprise indexes for the world, and its scoreboard shows the U.S. is most disappointing relative to consensus forecasts, with Latin America and Canada next, as of March 12. Emerging markets were supposed to be hurt by falling oil prices but are now delivering positive surprises. U.S. policymakers frequently talk about weakness in Europe and China, though both are exceeding expectations.

The Killed by Police Facebook Page and the Numbers Last week, we wrote about the fact that the U.S. government doesn’t track how many people are killed by the police. The FBI tracks “justifiable” police homicides, which it reports to be about 400 per year, but that tally is an undercount.

Given this vacuum, attention has recently turned to some excellent nongovernmental attempts to compile this data, including the Fatal Encounters database, the recently created Gun Violence Archive and a new database created by Deadspin.

But one recent effort stood out for its apparent comprehensiveness: The Killed By Police Facebook page, which aggregates links to news articles on police-related killings and keeps a running tally on the number of victims. The creator of the page does not seek to determine whether police killings are justifiable; each post “merely documents the occurrence of a death.” He told FiveThirtyEight that he was an instructor on nonviolent physical-intervention techniques and that he prefers to remain anonymous.

Charter Schools are Swell, after all—as long as they send $ to the Empire’s dues eaters A successful push by educators at the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools would hand an important victory to United Teachers Los Angeles as it struggles to reverse years of declining membership. The move could also pose a challenge to charters, which have been able to hire and fire staff without union rules — a key factor they believe helps provide the best instruction for students.

Stuxnet Leaker Stuck in Israel/US/Iran Catch-ah-33? A sensitive leak investigation of a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has stalled amid concerns that a prosecution in federal court could force the government to confirm a joint U.S.-Israeli covert operation targeting Iran, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Federal investigators suspect that retired Marine Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright leaked to a New York Times reporter details about a highly classified operation to hobble Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability through cyber-sabotage — an effort not acknowledged by Israel or the United States.

Prosecutors will have to overcome significant national security and diplomatic concerns if they want to move forward, including pitting the Obama administration against Israel if that ally were opposed to any information about the cyber-operation being revealed in court.

The United States could move forward with the case against Israel’s ­wishes, but such a move might further harm relations between two countries, which are already frayed because of a disagreement over how best to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Administration officials also fear that any revelations could complicate the current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

“There are always legitimate national security reasons for not proceeding in one of these ­cases,” said John L. Martin, who handled many sensitive espionage investigations as a former Justice Department prosecutor.

How the US Funds Dissent Against Latin American Governments “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”National Endowment for Democracy founding father, Allen Weinstein

The U.S. government and military have a long history of interfering in the affairs of numerous countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

By the end of the 19th century, there had been at least 10 U.S. military interventions across the hemisphere including Argentina (1890), Chile (1891), Haiti (1891), Panama (1895), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898) and Nicaragua (1894, 1896, 1898 and 1899).

From this time onward, successive U.S. administrations applied different strategies and tactics for involvement in the region as a means to secure and protect its geopolitical and economic interests. However, only recently has there been wider acknowledgement about the role that U.S. funding to nongovernmental organizations — particularly via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — plays in furthering U.S. foreign policy.http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/How-the-US-Funds-Dissent-against-Latin-American-Governments-20150312-0006.html

More on those wacky, drunken, whoring Secret Service Agents (with full auto weapons)Two Secret Service agents suspected of being under the influence while striking a White House security barricade drove through an active bomb investigation and directly beside the suspicious package, according to current and former government officials familiar with the incident.

These and other new details about the March 4 incident emerged Thursday from interviews and from police records obtained by The Washington Post.

The revelations spurred fresh questions Thursday from lawmakers about whether the newly appointed director of the Secret Service, Joseph P. Clancy, is capable of turning around the troubled agency.

The Long March for this? Chinese social fascists want to rule reincarnation (choose me!)

Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms.

Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing.

Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.

Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. Their anger welled up on Wednesday, as it had a day earlier.

Zhu Weiqun, a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially, no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.

Arrested for Speaking at Michigan State Trustees’ Meeting It’s Dec. 12, the day before controversial speaker George Will is scheduled to address the winter graduating class.

The Michigan State University Board of Trustees meeting is packed with people who registered to speak in opposition to Will. Later in the meeting the board takes up a proposal to increase President Lou Anna K. Simon’s salary from $520,000 a year to $750,000 a year.

Noah Saperstein, 23, spoke up. He had not registered to speak on Simon — it wasn’t on the agenda.

“I said something to the effect of, ‘We have adjunct professors, why not an adjunct president?’” Saperstein told City Pulse.

Saperstein would be arrested moments later. The charge? Violation of an MSU disorderly conduct ordinance: “Disruption of normal campus building or area activities.” He faces 93 days in jail, he said, for speaking out of turn at a public meeting. Officials say he interfered with the operation of a building and he breached the peace.

Saperstein is a union organizer for the Graduate Student union funded by the American Federation of Teachers. The union represents 1,400 teaching assistants in 70 departments at MSU.

Snowden wants the Same Deal Petraeus Got Jesselyn Radack, one of Snowden’s American legal advisers, says Kucherena’s statement echoes what they’ve been saying all along. Were Snowden to return, he would face charges under the World War I-era Espionage Act.

“Snowden would be amenable to coming back to the United States for the kind of plea bargain that Gen. [David] Petraeus received,” Radack said, reacting to news that the former general admitted to providing classified information to his mistress while he led the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s not the first time Snowden has publicly said he wants to return to the U.S.

It appears LA Voters Believe Lucy Parsons was Right As of Wednesday morning, turnout was 8.6%, according to numbers from the City Clerk’s office. That number will rise as more absentee and provisional ballots are counted

Who are main Hiring Agents at San Diego State? Cops. Mercs. Spies. High tech droners. The education agenda is a War Agenda Subject: Invitation to the Career Services Security Clearance Symposium–March 10, 2015

Looking for a position with the US government or a defense contractor? Want to know what it takes to get a security clearance? Join a panel of employers discussing the types of security clearance and what you should expect during the clearance process. Scheduled panelists include representatives from the CIA, SPAWAR, Northrop Grumman and Accenture Federal. This program is not only an opportunity to learn about the security clearance process, but also an opportunity to meet and network with representatives from these organizations. Bring your resume!

The program will be held on Tuesday, March 10, 2015, from 10:00 AM until 12:00 PM in Templo Mayor at the Conrad Prebys Aztec Student Union.
10:00 – 11:00– Panel of employers will discuss their security policies, and answer questions from the audience.
11:00 – 12:00– Attendees can network individually with employers. Bring your resumes as employers may be hiring!
If you are unable to attend for the entire two hours, feel free to stay as long as you can, or join us just for the networking after the panel.

This event is open to all majors. No admission charge for current SDSU students, faculty, staff and SDSU alumni. Current students, please register at Aztec Career Center.
For questions/additional information, please contact

Detroit Mayor Won’t Release Locations of Broken Fire Hydrants: City would burn down Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration has declined a Motor City Muckraker request for public records that show how many fire hydrants are broken and where they are located across the city, saying the information would be used by an arsonist “to plan and start a mass fire in those specific areas.”

The request was part of our two-month investigation that revealed Thursday that the city has neglected hundreds, if not thousands, of broken hydrants in front of occupied houses, apartment high-rises, restaurants, downtown buildings and even three fire stations.

The city claimed to it knew about only 70 broken hydrants, so we wanted to see where they were and why they haven’t been fixed. But providing a list “would assist an arsonist to plan and to start a mass fire in those specific areas,” city attorney Ellen Ha wrote in a letter denying the Freedom of Information Act request. Never mind that broken hydrants are easy to find because they are either wrapped in yellow caution tape or have a yellow “out-of-service” disc attached to the front of them. motorcitymuckraker.com/2015/03/06/city-releasing-records-of-broken-hydrants-would-start-a-mass-fire/

UC Irvine Students seek to ban all flags The student resolution adopted Thursday by the legislative council of the campus’ Associated Students called for removing all flags from the common lobby area of student government offices.
Written by student Matthew Guevara of the school of social ecology, the resolution stated: “The American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism” and notes that flags “construct paradigms of conformity and sets homogenized standards.”

The resolution passed on a 6-4 vote by the student legislative council, with two abstentions.

On Saturday, UC Irvine issued a statement saying the student government vote was “misguided.”

Student Suspended for handing out Forms to Opt out of Tests Adelina Silva, a student at Capshaw Middle School in Santa Fe, told KRQE that she was handing out opt-out forms that are available on the school district’s website. Silva said that she took this action because she wanted parents of her classmates to know that there was an opportunity to opt out of the testing. “My goal here was to just let the parents know that they have the option,” she said.

About to quit, Michigan School Boss Notes that School reform and economic reform are related! Mike Flanagan is less than four months from retiring, but the state’s top education official delivered a hard-hitting message Tuesday, urging action on poverty to help underprivileged students learn.

“We can talk about the progress we’ve made with 19 percent of students being college ready in all four areas, and 70 percent of students ready in three areas, but we still need to do better,” he said during the Michigan Governor’s Economic Summit and the Governor’s Education Summit. “We must be cognizant of all kids being ready.”

Michigan pays $4.9 Million to Use Capital’s Common Corpse Michigan is paying $4.9 million this school year to continue its membership in a group developing standardized tests aligned with national Common Core education standards. A Missouri judge last week voided that state’s fees to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, calling the consortium an “unlawful interstate compact” to which Congress never consented.

It is not known if the Michigan Education Department will keep paying the fee in the next academic year. Spokesman Bill DiSessa told The Associated Press that the fee allows Michigan to include Smarter Balanced test items in new M-STEP exams this spring that are replacing the 44-year-old MEAP tests. The M-STEP is a stopgap after lawmakers rejected plans to administer the Smarter Balanced tests to roughly 800,000 students in grades 3-8 and 11th.r ead more at: www.monroenews.com/news/2015/mar/02/michigan-pays-49m-for-membership-in-common-core/

York on Strike, classes Suspended In an unlikely twist of labour fate, Canada’s two largest universities are hit by strikes at the same time, throwing more than 100,000 undergraduates across the GTA into turmoil in the final stretch of the academic year.

York University on Tuesday suspended all classes, exams and academic activities, with limited exceptions, after the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3903 voted to strike, to ensure all students are affected equally.

York facilities, including libraries, residences, computer labs, cafeterias and athletic facilities will remain open, the university said.

York’s 3,700 teaching assistants and contract professors voted Monday night, rejecting an offer the union executive urged them to turn down for not providing the wage hikes and job security it was seeking. More 1,100 members attended the meeting, with 71 per cent voting to shoot down the offer.

“We have directed our bargaining team to go back to the table (Tuesday),” said CUPE 3903 Chair Faiz Ahmed. “I am confident that this is going to be wrapped up … the university knows we’re not that far apart.”

At the University of Toronto, 6,000 teaching assistants in CUPE 3902 already walked off the job Friday night on all three campuses, cancelling tutorials, labs and some classes and leaving unclear who will mark assignments.

The Reagan Library Educates the Kiddies about Urgent Fury, the Invasion of Grenada On multimillion dollar sets replicating the Reagan White House, children play the parts of key officials and reporters to reenact the invasion of Grenada. The U.S. invaded the Caribbean island nation in 1983, fearing a communist takeover after a coup.

Making a 27-year-old invasion relevant for today’s children isn’t always easy. Kids have to be told what communists are, and why Grenada becoming a communist country would have been a big deal.

The reenactments are part history lesson, part interactive game. The kids decide whether or not to invade, how to carry out an invasion, even how to deal with media leaks.

NY City Teachers Union Closing Part of its Charter—test scores–The New York City teachers’ union announced on Friday that it was closing the kindergarten-to-eighth-grade portion of a charter school because of students’ low scores on state tests, ending an experiment intended to prove that such schools could thrive even with strict labor rules.

Charter schools are publicly financed but privately operated, and the vast majority of charter schools in the city are not unionized, giving them flexibility to have longer hours and the power to replace teachers easily.

In announcing the closing, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Michael Mulgrew, blamed the State University of New York for its “narrow focus on state tests,” saying that despite low test scores, the school had “a high level of parent satisfaction.” SUNY had granted the school’s charter.

When the U.F.T. Charter School opened in 2005, Mr. Mulgrew’s predecessor, Randi Weingarten, who is now the president of the American Federation of Teachers, pledged that it would “show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results, finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.”

Fla Test Mess Continues Florida’s testing glitches are continuing despite assurances from state officials that problems have been fixed.

Education Commissioner Pam Stewart told legislators on Thursday that on the third day of testing students were able to log into the online portal being used for the test. Students in middle school and high school are using the portal to take a required standardized writing test.

But the Florida Times-Union reported that Duval County was forced to suspend testing shortly after it began on Thursday morning. The school superintendent said students saw blank screens when trying to log in.

Greenwald on the US in Syria and Ukraine—replays It’s easy to forget that just two years ago, President Obama was determined to bomb Syria and remove the Assad regime, and U.S. establishment institutions were working to lay the groundwork for that campaign. NPR began dutifully publishing reports from anonymous U.S. officials that Syria had stockpiled large amounts of chemical weapons; the NYT was reporting that Obama was “increasing aid to the rebels and redoubling efforts to rally a coalition of like-minded countries to forcibly bring down” Assad; Secretary of State John Kerry pronounced that forced removal of Assad was “a matter of national security” and “a matter of the credibility of the United States of America.”

Those opposed to the anti-Assad “regime change” bombing campaign argued that while some of the rebellion was composed of ordinary Syrians, the “rebels” the U.S. would arm and empower (i.e., the only effective anti-Assad fighters) were actually violent extremists and even terrorists aligned with Al Qaeda and worse. The people arguing that were invariably smeared as Assad apologists because this happened to be the same argument Assad was making: that the most effective fighters against him were jihadis and terrorists.

But that argument in D.C. was quickly converted from taboo into conventional wisdom the moment it was needed to justify U.S. involvement in Syria. The U.S. is now bombing Syria, of course, but rather than fighting against Assad, the Syrian dictator is (once again) America’s ally and partner. The rationale for the U.S. bombing campaign is the same one Assad long invoked: that those fighting against him are worse than he is because they are aligned with Al Qeada and ISIS (even though the U.S. funded and armed those factions for years and their closest allies in the region continue to do so).

A similar dynamic is at play in Russia and Ukraine. Yesterday, Obama’s top national security official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, told a Senate Committee “that he supports arming Ukrainian forces against Russian-backed separatists,” as the Washington Postput it. The U.S. has already provided “non-lethal” aid to Ukrainian forces, and Obama has said he is now considering arming them. Who, exactly, would that empower? firstlook.org/theintercept/greenwald/

Who Lost the Afghan “Security” Forces” The number of Afghan security forces fell sharply during 2014, thanks partly to desertions and casualties, according to newly declassified U.S. military data released on Tuesday that could add to the debate over planned U.S. troop withdrawals.

The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan hinges on the ability of Afghan forces to secure the country despite a still-resilient Taliban insurgency and increasingly limited support from the shrinking foreign forces supporting them.

Cockburn: Isis is Proof of the Failure of the US War on “Terror” Today al-Qaeda-type movements rule a vast area in northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, several hundred times larger than any territory ever controlled by Osama bin Laden. It is since bin Laden’s death that al-Qaeda affiliates or clones have had their greatest successes, including the capture of Raqqa in the eastern part of Syria, the only provincial capital in that country to fall to the rebels, in March 2013. In January 2014, ISIS took over Fallujah just forty miles west of Baghdad, a city famously besieged and stormed by US Marines ten years earlier. Within a few months they had also captured Mosul and Tikrit. The battle lines may continue to change, but the overall expansion of their power will be difficult to reverse. With their swift and multipronged assault across central and northern Iraq in June 2014, the ISIS militants had superseded al-Qaeda as the most powerful and effective jihadi group in the world.

These developments came as a shock to many in the West, including politicians and specialists whose view of what was happening often seemed outpaced by events. One reason for this was that it was too risky for journalists and outside observers to visit the areas where ISIS was operating, because of the extreme danger of being kidnapped or murdered. “Those who used to protect the foreign media can no longer protect themselves,” one intrepid correspondent told me, explaining why he would not be returning to rebel-held Syria.

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. Speaking at West Point on America’s role in the world on May 28, 2014, President Obama said that the main threat to the US no longer came from al-Qaeda central but from “decentralized al-Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused on the countries where they operate.” He added that “as the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.” This was true enough, but Obama’s solution to the danger was, as he put it, “to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists.” By June he was asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. It is here that there was a real intention to deceive, because, as Biden was to admit five months later, the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups. In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.

An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups … The resurgence of al-Qaeda–type groups is not a threat confined to Syria, Iraq, and their near neighbors. What is happening in these countries, combined with the growing dominance of intolerant and exclusive Wahhabite beliefs within the worldwide Sunni community, means that all 1.6 billion Muslims, almost a quarter of the world’s population, will be increasingly affected. It seems unlikely that non-Muslims, including many in the West, will be untouched by the conflict. Today’s resurgent jihadism, having shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, is already having far-reaching effects on global politics, with dire consequences for us all. www.unz.com/pcockburn/isis-is-proof-of-the-failed-war-on-terror/

Drone Pilots Bailing The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.

There are roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as “18Xs,” working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another 180 pilots graduate annually from a training program that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those same 12 months, about 240 trained pilots quit and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (The better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.) www.tomdispatch.com/post/175964/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_is_drone_warfare_fraying_at_the_edges/

America’s Wars as Bloated Hollywood Productions Like so many bloated Hollywood movies nowadays, America’s wars may bomb, but they always produce their own sequels.

Look at the latest news from Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have persisted for more than a decade, with several re-releases to include “surges” and repeats. The latest from Iraq is preparations to retake the city of Mosul from ISIS, which promises a repeat of the level of destruction visited upon Fallujah in 2004. In this there are echoes of Vietnam: in Mosul, we may have to destroy the city to save it. Five Iraqi brigades, most likely supported by American airpower and some American troops on the ground (air controllers and Special Forces), are poised to strike as early as April. Doubtless they’ll prevail, at least for the moment, as the city and its civilians pay a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat. Mosul will be “liberated,” but just look what happened to Fallujah, which after the American “victory” in 2004 is now a devastated city retaken by elements of al-Qaeda in 2014. contraryperspective.com/2015/02/22/americas-wars-as-bloated-hollywood-productions/

China to Increase Military Budget only 10% China said yesterday it would increase its military budget by “about 10 per cent” this year.

State media said it could be the lowest increase in five years, amid a slowdown in economic growth and close scrutiny from neighbouring countries.

Thank Hillbillary, Susan Power +Rice Islamist militants are reported to have seized two oil fields in central Libya, as rival groups fight for control of the country. Forces guarding the Bahi and Mabruk sites retreated after running out of ammunition. It is not clear which group seized the oil fields. Libya’s internationally recognised government in Tobruk and its rivals Libya Dawn also conducted air strikes on each other’s positions.

Libya has been without an effective government since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted in 2011.

The combined net worth of the world’s billionaires has reached a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion, according to the latest compilation published by Forbes magazine on Monday.

There are a record 1,826 billionaires, each with an average wealth of $3.8 billion. Relative to last year, the world’s billionaires have increased their combined wealth by more than 10 percent, from $6.4 trillion in 2014, while the total number of billionaires has grown by 11 percent.

In introducing its report, Forbes noted the striking disconnect between the continued surge in the wealth of the world’s ultra-rich and the state of the world economy. “Despite plunging oil prices and a weakened euro, the ranks of the world’s wealthiest defied global economic turmoil and expanded once again,” the magazine commented. www.globalresearch.ca/wealth-of-worlds-billionaires-surges-past-7-trillion/5434717

Hillbillary Ducked FOIAs Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

Hillbillary sucks Foreign Foundation Money by the Millions Hillary Clinton’s political enemies believe they may have finally located her Achilles’ Heel.

In the days following a Washington Post report that the Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments while Clinton served as secretary of state, and that a $500,000 contribution from the government of Algeria potentially violated an ethics agreement with the Obama White House, criticism of the Democratic presidential frontrunner has been pointed, especially from her would-be Republican rivals. and in the WAPO….

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.

A Sea of People Fight For Water in Sao Paulo (thank Freire’s opportunist politics) It was the first major public protest on the issue and involved people like the seamstress Maria Francisca da Conceição, 69, who walked, wearing her flip-flops, the 6300 meters that separate Largo da Batata, in Pinheiros neighborhood, and the Bandeirantes Palace in Morumbi, where is the official residence of the governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) is located. Maria Francisca has been a resident of an MTST occupation in Numa Pompilius, in the extreme east of the city of São Paulo, since early 2014, when she joined the homeless movement. A São Paulo native, she says she has always been afraid to end up under water, drowning (Sao Paulo is known for the heavy rains that often result in floods that stop the entire metropolis). She never imagined that she would go through the rigors of a drought. ninja.oximity.com/article/A-sea-of-people-fighting-for-water-in-1

Detroit’s Glorious Fisher Building Foreclosed

Here’s a sentence with the power to make any Detroiter shudder: The Fisher Building is headed to auction this summer. Dwindling tenant numbers have pushed the Fisher into foreclosure, and now the 30-story Art Deco landmark faces the ultimate indignity: a stint on Auction.com.

As the anchor of New Center and one of Detroit’s most important landmarks, the stakes couldn’t be any higher. Except they are. The auction also includes the Albert Kahn Building, a smaller Art Deco building across 2nd Avenue. The two buildings add up to nearly one million square feet. The Fisher’s symbolic value in Detroit can’t really be overstated. Opened in 1927, it’s the masterpiece of Detroit’s master architect, Albert Kahn. The dazzling lobby is rivaled only by that the Guardian Building. Because it stands alone in New Center, the Fisher’s tower sticks out of the Detroit landscape like the Washington Monument. At night, it’s visible for miles. detroit.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/fisher-building-foreclosure-detroits-art-deco-masterpiece-heads-to-auction-this-summer.php

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Leaker Petraeus Gets Slapped Wrist for Giving Top Secret Material to Paramour David H. Petraeus, the best-known military commander of his generation, has reached a plea deal with the Justice Department and admitted providing his highly classified journals to a mistress when he was the director of the C.I.A.

Mr. Petraeus has agreed to plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemeanor. He is eligible for up to one year in prison but prosecutors will recommend two years of probation and a $40,000 fine.

The plea deal completes a spectacular fall for Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who was once discussed as a possible candidate for vice president or even president. He led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the architect of a counterinsurgency strategy that at one time seemed a model for future warfare.

But the deal also ends two years of uncertainty and allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues. Even while under investigation, he has advised the White House on Iraq and terrorism issues.

The mistress, Paula Broadwell, is a former Army Reserve officer who had an affair with Mr. Petraeus in 2011, when she was interviewing him for a biography, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Attica Prison Guards Plead Guilty for Beating Prisoners but dodge jail Three guards accused in the brutal beating of an inmate at the state prison here in 2011 each pleaded guilty on Monday to a single misdemeanor charge and agreed to quit their jobs in a last-minute deal that will avert a trial but spare them any jail time.

The case was the first time that any state corrections officers had been criminally charged with a nonsexual assault of an inmate, officials said.

The plea arrangement was announced in State Supreme Court in Wyoming County just as the guards were to have gone on trial on charges of gang assault, filing false reports and evidence tampering.

Instead, the three guards, Sgt. Sean Warner, 39, and Officers Keith Swack, 39, and Matthew Rademacher, 31, pleaded guilty to official misconduct, a misdemeanor. As part of the agreement, according to Norman Effman, one of the defense lawyers, the guards agreed to resign from their jobs to avoid jail time. The agreement was accepted by Judge Michael M. Mohun after he dismissed the unusually large pool of jurors who had been summoned for the case.

Those Horndog Airmarshalls Protecting us Federal air marshals assigned to protect commercial flights across the U.S. were furtively pulled from their assigned flights so they could meet for sexual trysts, get better routes or travel to cities they preferred, according to documents and interviews with current and former employees.

What began as an internal investigation into allegations of harassment and threats stemming from a spat between ex-lovers has expanded into a criminal inquiry focused on the Federal Air Marshal Service’s dispatch hub in Herndon, Virginia. More than 60 federal employees are under scrutiny as investigators look into whether flights considered at risk of hijacking or a terrorist attack were left without marshals on board, sources with knowledge of the investigation told Reveal.

At the center of the inquiry is Michelle D’Antonio, 48, who worked for the service for more than a decade until she was placed on administrative leave in December 2013. As a program specialist, she was responsible for coordinating delayed, missed or canceled flights and providing other logistical support, giving her access to sensitive government databases.

Instead, current and former employees say, she used her position to look up personnel files, identification photographs and flight schedules to pinpoint air marshals she was interested in meeting and possibly dating.

Labor Notes Editor thrilled he got a chance to speak to the police at the Al Shanker Inst (who cares about imperialism when the coppers pat you on the head?) Recently I was invited to speak at the Albert Shanker Institute, the think tank run by the American Federation of Teachers. I know, it kind of makes your head explode, right?

Heavyweights from across the country gathered there in January to discuss the future of our movement. After I got past the suits and lingering hot air, I was struck by just how far the discussion—even in official circles—has swung towards labor’s troublemaking wing.

Wisconsin Votes to End Forced Dues Collection Racket (no strikes called) The State Assembly on Friday approved legislation barring unions from requiring workers to pay the equivalent of dues, leaving Wisconsin poised to become the 25th state with what advocates describe as a right-to-work law.

Gov. Scott Walker, who said before he was re-elected to a second term in November that he did not expect right-to-work legislation to be taken up this session, has since said that he will sign the measure within days. The move was expected to burnish Mr. Walker’s image as a conservative willing to take on unions as he flirts with a run for the Republican nomination for president.

West Virginia Tries to Dump Common Core. Teachers Union fights to save it. WV Federation of Teachers president Christine Campbell does not support WV’s CCSS repeal, citing, among other issues, that “it took two years to develop the Next Generation standards.”

CIA vs NSA–who shall rule the next bungled cyber war? the CIA has concluded it has been outflanked and outwitted on a critical front: digital tradecraft.

On Friday, the CIA acknowledged that it was time to move into the 21st century, saying it was creating a special division to conduct cyberespionage.

Along with crunching data to help identify and approach new spies to recruit, the CIA hopes to improve its ability to trace the “digital dust” that potential targets leave during activities such as using an ATM card, renting a car or moving through a city with a cellphone.

Good Old FBI–Still Manufacturing Plots The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.”

In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern: firstlook.org/theintercept/greenwald/

The Magical Mystery Tour

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, six-in-ten Americans (60%) say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” while a third (33%) reject the idea of evolution, saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” The share of the general public that says that humans have evolved over time is about the same as it was in 2009, when Pew Research last asked the question.

About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” (32% of the American public overall). But many Americans believe that God or a supreme being played a role in the process of evolution. Indeed, roughly a quarter of adults (24%) say that “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.” www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/

Judge Judy, America’s Last Moral Compass, May Rule Forever Judge Judith Sheindlin has signed on for five more televised years of sorting out rancorous rent disputes, adjudicating stranger-than-fiction dognapping cases and, as ever, zinging litigants as coming from a long line of idiots.

India: Thousands Protesting A protest that began last Monday with about 1,000 people has now swollen to more than 5,000. As Scroll reported last week, the arrest of a primary school cook, Hadma Mutchaki of Hamirgarh village, brought 1,000 adivasis to demonstrate outside Tongal police station in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district on February 16. The police had charged Mutchaki with aiding the Maoists in the murder of a police informer. But the protestors said he was innocent and had been wrongly framed. Men, women and children sat on the national highway outside the police station, blocking it for 17 hours, and bringing all road traffic between Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh to a halt.

The next day, activists Soni Sori and Bela Bhatia persuaded the protestors to move from the highway to a ground near the police station. But the protest itself did not dissipate. It gained strength after the police detained three of the protestors, Hidma Kawasi, Ramji Mandavi and Podiyami Budhra. The final straw came when the three men emerged from police custody with injury marks. They alleged they had been beaten up while in custody. As the news spread, thousands of adivasis from villages across Darbha, Kuakonda, Chhindgarh and Sukma blocks of Bastar and Sukma districts converged on Tongpal on Thursday. scroll.in/article/708704/An-adivasi-protest-in-Chhattisgarh-is-gaining-strength-%E2%80%93-but-not-getting-much-attention

Seven Things to Know about the Texas Prison Rebellion 3) The facility is nicknamed “Tent City” or “Ritmo.” While an ICE contracted facility, the Willacy detention center was dubbed Tent City by local advocates and the media because two thirds of the facility is built out of a series of Kevlar pods. The facility was also designated Ritmo (or Raymondville’s Guantanamo) in the media because of its enormous size and appalling conditions.

4) This is at least the third major uprising at CAR private prison in recent years. An uprising that led to the death of a guard and many injured immigrant prisoners at the Corrections Corporation of America CAR facility in Adams County, Mississippi in 2012 was brought about by poor conditions detailed in this report by Justice Strategies. Another uprising at the Reeves County, Texas CAR facility operated by private prison corporation GEO Group in 2008 followed the death of prisoner Jesus Manuel Galindo and was covered excellently by the Texas Observer amongst other media outlets.

In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from.

The following excerpt concerns Iraq midway through the first decade of this century.

Student Debt: We Won’t Pay! athan Hornes didn’t think he’d still be working in fast food on his 25th birthday. He had a plan: he wanted to be a pop singer-songwriter and had moved from Missouri to Los Angeles after his 2008 high school graduation in order to become a star.

He never thought he would first be getting national press coverage as part of what may be the first organized student debt strike. But he and 14 other students, with the support of the Occupy Wall Street spinoff group The Debt Collective, are taking a stand and refusing to pay back the student loans they took out to attend the for-profit Corinthian colleges.

Corinthian is being dismantled and its students given debt relief on their private loans – the institution is under federal and state investigations and is the target of multiple lawsuits alleging predatory lending practices. But Hornes and the “Corinthian 15” are demanding relief for their federal student loans, too.

When Hornes moved to LA, he worked at Smashburger and Carl’s Jr to pay the bills while he pursued his dream: performing at the Staples Center, participating in a web series, even releasing two songs on iTunes. But two years in, he says, his mother began to press him to go to college.

When he saw a commercial for Everest College, one of Corinthian’s subsidiary schools, he was reminded that his cousin had attended an Everest school in Missouri. She’d made it sound pretty good, telling him Everest had a flexible schedule that allowed her to get a degree while working, and had promised her help with finding a job after graduation.

Internationalist Elementary Students Use Bodies to Promote Unity–San DiegoNearly 1,500 students from San Diego County and Tijuana came together on Thursday to share one message: “Unite Por El Mar,” which translates to “Unite for the Sea.” (photo is larger at link below)

The children stood to form the words at Borderfield State Park and Playas de Tijuana near the U.S-Mexico border after picking up trash on the beaches.

Trapped by Union Contracts, Many Adjuncts Couldn’t Walk out When the idea for National Adjunct Walkout Day was first floated last fall on social media, the plan was simple: Designate a single day of action, and stage events nationwide that would call attention to adjuncts’ often-low pay, lack of job security, and challenging working conditions. In contingent circles, the idea spread like wildfire.

N.M. Teacher Disciplined–distributed opt out of tests lit –NEA Gutless Again A Farmington elementary teacher was placed on administrative leave Thursday after giving her students paperwork for opting out of state testing during class.

Sharon Yocum, an Esperanza Elementary School fifth-grade teacher, was informed by a member of the Farmington Municipal School District administration Thursday morning that she would be placed on paid leave pending the outcome of an investigation for alleged unprofessional conduct.

Yocum said she was trying to inform parents and students of their options regarding the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, exam which New Mexico public schools starts administering on Monday.

Yocum said she has seen her students become discouraged as they take the quarterly assessments and prepare for the PARCC exam.

“My kids are dreading the test, they are dreading it,” Yocum said. “I don’t think it’s fair to the kids. I’ve got smart kids, top notch kids. On their daily work they get A’s then it comes to this interim testing, they get D’s and F’s. It’s not an accurate reflection of their skills.”

Yocum believes Farmington schools and other state school districts are trying to hide the choice of opting-out of the PARCC from parents and students.

Santa Fe Students Walkout About 250 students walked out of classes Monday at Santa Fe High and Capital High schools in protest of the upcoming PARCC exams, the state’s newly imposed standardized tests that will be used to assess student achievement and evaluate schools and teachers.

Police were called to Capital after some students pulled down a parking lot gate with a truck, but otherwise the walkouts remained largely civil. About 30 students made their way to the Capitol building in downtown Santa Fe to make their concerns known directly to lawmakers.

The protests reflect the anxiety both on the parts of students and teachers over the exams — the latest evolution of high-stakes testing to hit public schools. Teachers unions and some school boards across the state have asked the New Mexico Public Education Department to delay the implementation of the exams — which test students’ aptitude in reading and math using Common Core standards.

Cambridge: Save Marx! (perhaps Cambridge remembers the Five?) With talk of the Philosophy department drastically cutting the teaching on Marx and other radical thinkers around political philosophy, a student-run campaign and petition has sprung up at Cambridge University in response.

Arguing for the ‘Faculty of Philosophy to keep the existing paper and lecture course on Marxism on its syllabus, against the Faculty’s decision to reduce coverage of this and other radical philosophy papers’. Students are worried that ‘they will receive drastically reduced or no coverage’ on the topics or Marxism, Anarchism and on ‘Power’. We share their concern of ‘vastly reducing the non-liberal content of the syllabus’ and defend the importance of radical ideas especially in times like these.

To ignore a thinker like Marx seems absurd as his importance even from a very conservative standpoint is hard to overstate. In the area of philosophy, the basis he laid out, which was later elaborated on by others is an incredibly fruitful area of insight and deserves to be studied by not just students but by all. Marx’s dive into Hegelian philosophy to ‘discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’ culminated in his elaborate theoretical framework not just designed to understand but to change the world. marxiststudent.com/save-marx-cambridge-university-students-fight-for-radical-ideas/

Furor Over the National Flag Genuflect It’s a story about three top students at South Portland High School, four little words added to the daily invitation to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and a provocative Facebook post that provided an unexpected lesson in the politics of the freedom of speech.

Senior class president Lily SanGiovanni sparked community outrage in January when she changed the way she invited students and faculty members to recite the pledge.

At this time,” SanGiovanni said over the intercom, “would you please rise and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance if you’d like to.”

It was the latest salvo in a monthslong effort by SanGiovanni and some of her friends to make it clear that reciting the pledge is optional under state and federal law, so students cannot be forced to stand and say it every morning. Although no students have filed formal complaints in recent years, SanGiovanni and her friends said they and other students have felt uncomfortable or pressured by their teachers to say it.

The addition of “if you’d like to” inflamed simmering opposition from staff members who had been wrestling with the pledge issue since June. It also triggered an emotional, anti-immigrant backlash in the community and left SanGiovanni and her friends searching for a way to carry their cause forward.

Capital’s Wars on AP History Oklahoma is far from alone in wanting to reinvent the wheel by creating its own, allegedly more patriotic version of advanced coursework. Policymakers in Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina and Colorado have agitated to scrap or doctor the AP course, citing its “liberal bias” and supposed focus on U.S. “blemishes.” The Republican National Committee likewise called on Congress last year to withhold funding from the nonprofit that developed the course, the College Board, because its AP course “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” In Colorado, where a local school board proposed revamping the AP curriculum to make sure it does “not encourage or condone civil disorder [or] social strife,” some brave students decided to demonstrate the virtues of civil disorder and social strife by peacefully protesting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-unflattering-history-lesson/2015/02/19/3be9cb0c-b878-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html#AP

Capital’s Twin, Racism, Doing Fine in Ca Colleges and Universities For a decade, California State University leaders have set aside several Sundays each February to visit churches in the African American community and preach the benefits of preparing young people for college.

During that time, undergraduate enrollment of African Americans at Cal State’s 23 campuses has mostly been on the decline, from 5.8% of the total student population in 2004 to 4.6% in 2013.

Factors in that slide include a downturn in the size of the African American population, poor high school preparation and lingering effects of the recession that have reduced access to many public colleges while forcing more students to work full time rather than enroll in school.

Cal State is not the only system with a low number of black students. The University of California and the state’s community colleges have seen flat or decreasing African American enrollment. Concerns about equal access to higher education for African Americans nationally spurred a White House initiative, which last year awarded more than $28 million in grants to boost college and career readiness.

The downward trend is particularly vexing for Cal State, the nation’s largest university system, which launched the first-of-its-kind Super Sunday initiative 10 years ago specifically to reach young students and their families through one of the community’s most important institutions: the church.

Cal State estimates that more than 600,000 churchgoers throughout the state have received information about eligibility, financial aid and the application process. Last Sunday, hundreds of people at South Los Angeles’ Crenshaw Christian Center heard Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White speak before services. www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-calstate-sunday-20150218-story.html

An advisory panel of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia.

Conservatives are cheering the move, seeing it as a corrective to a higher education system they believe has lent its imprimatur to groups that engage in partisan activism.

“They’re moving in the right direction, though I don’t think they went far enough,” said Francis X. De Luca, president of the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank based in Raleigh. “A lot of these centers were started up with a specific advocacy role in mind, as opposed to an educational role.”

But critics say the moves by a panel whose members were appointed by a Republican-dominated Legislature reflect the rightward tilt of state government.

San Fran School Boss Gets Nice bump in pay San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Richard Carranza will see an extra $65,000 in his annual paycheck — a 27 percent raise granted unanimously by the school board Tuesday night.

The bump in pay brings Carranza, in his third year as superintendent, to $310,000, starting July 1.

Sub Shortage School districts across the country have struggled with a severe substitute shortage for the last few years as an economic rebound has created better job options. The shortage has grown more severe as California school districts remove teachers from classrooms to receive training in Common Core State Standards.

Reactionary Jindall Easily Sign’s on to the Bourgeoisie Anti-Common Core After railing against the Common Core academic standards in speeches and on television talk shows, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is now trying another tactic to rally people to the cause: an online petition.

Jindal, who was a staunch supporter of the Common Core until he changed course in 2014, urged his 174,000 Twitter followers to sign the petition this week. Sign our petition to stop Common Core if you think a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to education is wrong: americanext.org/common-core/
1:00 PM – 18 Feb 2015

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Obamagouge’s Legacy: Permanent war and Liberal/Radical Acquiescence The announcement by the Obama administration that it will seek congressional authorization to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine did not generate the kind of muscular opposition and sense of urgency that one would expect from the anti-interventionist liberals and significant sectors of what use to be the anti-imperialist and anti-war left.
Outside of a few articles written by some of us confined to the marginalized and shrinking left, the reports that the administration was considering both of these courses of action were met with passing indifference. It is as if the capitalist oligarchy’s strategy of permanent war has been accepted as a fait-accompi by the general public and even significant numbers of the left.
The fact that the U.S. President could launch military attacks in Syria, supposedly a sovereign state and member of the United Nations, for six months without any legal justification and not face fierce criticism in the U.S. and internationally demonstrates the embrace of lawlessness that characterizes the current epoch of Western imperialist domination.
And the acquiescence of much of the left in the U.S. and Europe on the issue of Syria and the U.S.-supported coup in Ukraine reveals the moderating and accommodating forces within the faux left that attempts to bully and intimidate anti-imperialist critics.
To oppose the dismemberment of Syria or criticize the dangerous collaboration between the U.S. and racist neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine was reduced to the silly and intellectually lazy arguments that one was “pro-Assad” or a dupe for Putin! blackagendareport.com/node/14677

Psyche! Staying in Afghanistan After all Washington is considering shifting the deadline for troop its withdrawal from Afghanistan to make sure the “progress” from over 13 years of US operations in the country “sticks,” the new US Defense Secretary said during a surprise visit to Kabul.

“Our priority now is to make sure this progress sticks,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a news conference in Kabul with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. “That is why President Obama is considering a number of options to reinforce our support for President Ghani’s security strategy, including possible changes to the timeline for our drawdown of US troops.”

Under the current arrangement, the 11,000-strong US force should be cut to roughly 5,000 by the end of 2015, before pulling out altogether the following year, when Obama will leave office. By the end of 2016 the US military presence is expected to shrink to a “normal” embassy security contingent.

Obama is scheduled to visit Kabul next month, where Ghani will likely discuss US troop numbers with the American leader “in the context of the larger partnership.”

The US commander on the ground, General John Campbell, has previously suggested slowing the drawdown further. But while traveling with Carter on Saturday, Campbell said that his focus for now was sustaining enough US trainers, advisors and counter-terrorism forces in Afghanistan.

“Deadlines concentrate the mind. But deadlines should not be dogmas,” Ghani said. “If both parties or, in this case, multiple partners, have done their best to achieve the objectives and progress is very real, then there should be willingness to re-examine a deadline.”http://rt.com/usa/234467-troops-withdrawal-timeline-afghanistan/

Alfred McCoy: US Road Warriors My drone is yours, compadre! Or so Washington has now decided. The latest promise of good times in the arms trade comes from an administration that has pioneered a robotic assassination regime organized out of the White House (though credit for groundbreaking drone assassination work should go to Israel as well). Run largely by the CIA, the U.S. drone campaigns across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa have weekly taken out suspected enemies or even “targets” that exhibit (in the judgment of people thousands of miles away and from another culture) enemy-like behavior. In the process, the Bush and Obama administrations also pioneered the crossing of sovereign borders without permission for an ongoing killing process not defined as war and which, despite much bragging about “precision,” has regularly taken out ordinary civilians, including significant numbers of children.

In the process, it has brought a sense of daily terror to peasant populations in the backlands of the planet. Now, Washington is ready to spread the wealth. The State Department has just announced that armed Predator and Reaper drones will be available for sale to carefully vetted and selected allies around the world. This is, of course, splendid news for U.S. arms makers in a market that, over the next decade, is expected to more than double in size from $5.2 billion to $11.6 billion. However, as the Washington Postreports, this new program will build “on the Obama administration’s update last year to rules on conventional weapons transfers, which emphasize human rights protections in decisions about arms sales.”

For such sales, Washington, as the planetary “human rights” leader, is planning to set up “proper use” or “end use” rules when it comes to assassination by drone. Here’s a typical Washington rule of the road: if you buy an armed drone from the U.S., you must agree not to use “unlawful force against… domestic populations” — that is, you must not kill your own citizens in your own country. (Translation: Turkey could theoretically not use such drones against its Kurdish population.) Implied exception: You can target and assassinate your own citizens by drone as long as they are not within your own boundaries. This is a rule of the road that Washington has already definitively pioneered, so far killing four of its own citizens by drone in Yemen and Pakistan, which means assumedly that Turkey could indeed kill a Turkish Kurd as soon as he or she stepped across any border. www.tomdispatch.com/

Rashid–That Pakistan Labyrinth There is a bit of a hermetic feel to Pakistan these days, as if the country that lies on the ancient road from the West to Asia, a natural bridge, had somehow contorted itself into a self-imposed isolation. The border with India, dividing the Punjab, lies not far from this great city. It is a barrier rather than a gateway. The border with Afghanistan is problematic in its nonexistence. The beast nurtured in the name of Islamabad’s policy of “strategic depth” (whatever that may be), the Taliban in its Pakistani iteration, massacred 134 children at Peshawar’s Army Public School late last year. Not surprising then that tourism is down to a trickle. I made my way to the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort — high-walled, dusky-red, magnificent in extent. There was not a foreigner in sight, not a camera clicking.

President Obama goes to India and Pakistan is way down on his agenda — if it is there at all. Nobody in Washington frets any longer about balancing visits to New Delhi and Islamabad. Oh, yes, Afghanistan, American treasure and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), or top spy agency: Well, the less said about that, the better.racy and a great power rising. Pakistan is a Muslim homeland that lost half its territory in 1971, bounced back and forth between military and nominally democratic rule, never quite clear of annihilation angst despite its nuclear weapons, its prime ministers as susceptible to a violent end as Henry VIII’s wives, struggling to define its identity almost 68 years after it came into being. www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/opinion/roger-cohen-pakistan-in-its-labyrinth.html?_r=0

Stratfor: So Long Russia American think-tank Stratfor has issued a new ‘Decade Forecast,’ which says the EU will decay, China will end up in “a communist dictatorship,” and Russia will disintegrate…though it hasn’t done so yet, despite such predictions taking place in the past.

“It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form,” the forecast’s chapter dedicated to Russia begins. The research maintains that Moscow’s “failure to transform energy revenues into self-sustaining economy” will eventually lead to a “repeat of the Soviet Union’s experience in the 1980s and Russia’s in the 1990s,” with the process accompanied by a demographic decline that is set to “really hit” Russia.

However, the forecaster’s founder and CEO, George Friedman, recently said that Russia has the ability to emerge from US-led sanctions and the recent drop in the ruble due to falling oil prices. “Russians’ strength is that they can endure things that would break other nations,” Friedman said, suggesting that the country “has military and political power that could begin to impinge on Europe.” According to the forecast, Russia’s territorial losses will not be limited to the European part of the country. Its control over the North Caucasus is also predicted to “evaporate,” while maritime regions in Russia’s Far East will “move independently” to the countries they are “closely linked to” – namely China, Japan, and the US. Additionally, Karelia will “seek to rejoin” Finland. The US think-tank, sometimes referred to as a “shadow CIA” due to its employment of former CIA analysts, also warns that this time Russia’s alleged tendency of solving problems with “secret police” won’t work, and the Federal Security Service will be unable to rescue the country rt.com/usa/234983-stratfor-decade-forecast-russia/

Embedded Stratfor Video on Importance of Ukraine Ukraine is the quintessential borderland state. The country borders three former Soviet states (Russia, Belarus and Moldova) and four countries in the European Union (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania). Ukraine also has a coastline along the Black Sea to the south.

Ukraine sits on the Northern European Plain, the area that has historically served as an invasion superhighway going east and west.

Beyond its strategic location, Ukraine’s geography has only facilitated such invasions. The country consists of flat and fertile plains, with the exception of the Carpathian Mountain range that arches into the far west of the country. But even these mountains can be penetrated and have not posed a significant barrier to invasion.

Given such lack of barriers, Ukraine’s wide-open geography is inextricably linked to that of Russia. Ukraine’s agricultural and industrial belts have traditionally been integrated with Russia’s, and Ukraine serves as the primary transit state for Russian energy exports to Europe.

Due to its location and abundance of agricultural and mineral resources, Ukraine has been contested between regional powers for centuries. This competition is currently playing out in an extreme form today, with a Western-backed government confronting a Russian-backed uprising in eastern Ukraine. www.stratfor.com/video/ukraines-geographic-challenge

Brian Williams, again For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.” williamblum.org/aer/read/137

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Capitalist “Democracy”-2014 Midterm Election was Most Expensive, with Fewer Donors The 2014 election was the most expensive midterm election in history, costing a grand total of $3.77 billion. But for the first time since 1990, fewer Americans donated money in this midterm election than the one before. Simply put, more money went into the system, but fewer people provided it.

On Nov. 5, the Center for Responsive Politics projected the 2014 election would be the most expensive midterm ever based on how much was spent through early October. A new analysis taking into account year-end filings confirms that projection — and finds our estimate was low by roughly $104 million.

Among the most significant findings that can now be confirmed is that there were far fewer identifiable donors in the 2014 election than in the 2010 cycle. Then, CRP counted 869,602 donors; in 2014, we have been able to identify just 773,582 — a decline of more than 96,000, or about 11 percent. (A caveat: Our figure accounts only for those who gave more than $200, since the FEC does not require donors of less than that to be itemized on campaign finance reports.)

Detroit’s Tax Foreclosures The Burkes are just one year ahead of a massive tidal wave of tax foreclosures building in Detroit. In 2015, nearly 100,000 Detroiters – more than one-seventh of the city’s population – are facing foreclosure and the resale of their homes.

India: Killer Air a few days before U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in India in January this year, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi recorded an Air Quality Index reading of 222, a level that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes as “very unhealthy,” nearly “hazardous.” In fact, the pollution level was so bad that the embassy purchased 1,800 Swedish air purifiers ahead of the president’s arrival.

A year before Obama’s visit, New Delhi surpassed Beijing as the most polluted city in the world. As a whole, India’s air quality lags far behind that of the other BRIC countries. The country has 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world and, along with China, the highest average exposure to cancerous fine particles, which, because of their small size, can lodge deeply into human lungs. In 2010, India’s Central Pollution Control Board found that the particulate matter in 180 Indian cities was six times higher than World Health Organization standards.

Air pollution is an urgent public health crisis. More people in India die of chronic respiratory diseases and asthma than in any other nation in the world. According to a 2013 study conducted by Michael Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago, the 200 million people who live in India’s most polluted cities will lose an average of 3.3 years of life because of toxic air; all together, that is 650 million lost years. According to India’s Environmental Pollution Control Authority, air pollution in Delhi alone is responsible for the deaths of 3,000 children every year. … dirty air is just one of India’s many environmental problems. In addition to poor air quality, groundwater pollution, river contamination, indiscriminate mining, and the destruction of forests have severely comprised the health of the www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143177/ira-trivedi/harder-to-breathe?cid=nlc-foreign_affairs_today-022615-harder_to_breathe_6-022615&sp_mid=48112982&sp_rid=cmdAcmljaGdpYnNvbi5jb20S1y and its citizens. If India does not change course—and soon—the country will be facing disaster.

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Coppers Murder, attack, Protesting Teachers in Mexico teachers in Acapulco, Mexico, ran into a determined police line as they cut the main road to the city’s airport.

They were demanding better working conditions and justice for disappeared students and teachers, but when a bus was driven into the police line the security forces charged with their batons, killing one protester and injuring dozens.

“It was a legitimate response to protect those taking part in the
protest. If that bus hadn’t been controlled, there would have been
more injuries both to policemen and even teachers,” said Interior Ministry Commissioner Cabrera Castro.

Over 100 demonstrators were detained.

The teachers and many in Mexico blame local police forces in Guerrero province for colluding with drugs gangs in the disappearance and probable murder of the students and teachers who had been campaigning against corruption before they were kidnapped.

Obamagogue Continues to Seek to Disarm the Populace President Obama’s administration has proposed banning the manufacture and sale of one of the most popular bullets used in AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, a move that has enraged gun-rights advocates and caused a run on the ammunition at gun shops across the country.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said this month that it planned to restrict the armor-piercing 5.56-millimeter “M855 green tip” rifle bullet because of new handguns that use the ammunition and pose a greater threat to the police. Previously, the millions of inexpensive green-tip steel and lead bullets sold each year were only for rifles typically used by target shooters and hunters.

“With few exceptions, manufacturers will be unable to produce such armor-piercing ammunition, importers will be unable to import such ammunition, and manufacturers and importers will be prohibited from selling or distributing the ammunition,” the A.T.F. said in a highly technical 17-page submission on Feb. 13.

The proposal would allow people to use up the ammunition they have already bought. Gun shops and firearms organizations on Thursday said there had been a rush to snap up cases of the bullets since the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups sent out urgent alerts to their members.

Gun rights groups said their members had sent tens of thousands of letters to members of Congress echoing that message and demanding that the rule not be approved.

Pilger on the Rise of Fascism (again) “For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this. ..

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons. zcomm.org/znetarticle/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue/

Solidarity for Never

Opportunism, built by fake education left, redoubles–Connecticut’s largest teachers organization is calling for the elimination of major standardized testing, which the state had planned to use as part of teacher and school performance evaluation. The organization wants to replace it with more flexible “progress testing.”

Officials of the Connecticut Education Association said Monday they commissioned a survey that shows broad public support for placing more emphasis on classroom learning and less on time-consuming standardized tests.

Calif Faculty Assn Scabs on Latest Ghost Dance–National Adjunct Walkout Day The vast majority of adjuncts/lecturers across the U.S. and Canada do not have the protection of a union contract, and many of them are walking out of their jobs to express their disappointment in the higher ed management trend away from offering reliable faculty employment.

Earlier this month, CFA’s Lecturers’ Council wrote a letter to express solidarity with the day of action.

Although CSU faculty under a union contract, including CSU Lecturers, may not participate in job walk-outs, the Council expressed the intention to show “various means of symbolic support.”

Oh Woe in Alabama—the Dems Lost! What shall AEA Do? For most of its history, AEA has been a de facto arm of the Alabama Democratic Party, to the extent that a stranger from another state might struggle to tell the difference between an AEA convention and a Democratic Party convention.

The state Democratic Party’s current chairwoman is Nancy Worley, a former AEA president. When Worley presided over an AEA convention in the 1990s in Huntsville, she made a point of recognizing all the “good Democrats” in the assembly.

Who Lost Cuba? As Cuba opens the door wider to private enterprise, the gap between the haves and have-nots, and between whites and blacks, that the revolution sought to diminish is growing more evident.

Remittances, estimated at $1 billion to nearly $3 billion a year, are already a big source of the capital behind the new small businesses. The cash infusion has been one of the top drivers of the Cuban economy in recent years, rivaling tourism revenue and mineral, pharmaceutical and sugar exports.

Raising the remittance cap, along with allowing more Americans to visit Cuba and other steps toward normal diplomatic relations, will help “support the Cuban people,” the Obama administration contends.

But some will enjoy that support more than others. Cuban economists say that whites are 2.5 times more likely than blacks to receive remittances, leaving many in crumbling neighborhoods like Little Swamp nearly invisible in the rise of commerce, especially the restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts that tourists tend to favor.

“Remittances have produced new forms of inequality, particularly racial inequality,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. “Now the remittances are being used to fund or establish private companies, that is, not just to fund consumption, as in the past.”

The Cuban government argues that the shift to more private enterprise, a pillar of its strategy to bolster the flaccid economy, will allow it to focus its social programs on the neediest. As a billboard on a busy road in Havana proclaims, “The changes in Cuba are for more socialism.” ….“As Cuba is becoming more capitalist in the last 20 years, it has also become more unequal,” said Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College who studies the Cuban economy. “These shantytowns are all over Latin America, and Cuba’s attempt with revolution to solve that inequality succeeded to a certain degree for a time. But as capitalism increases, you have some people more well positioned to take advantage and others who are not.”http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/world/americas/as-cuba-shifts-toward-capitalism-inequality-grows-more-visible.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0

Spy versus Spy

Burgess Rises Again In a Moscow cemetery close to the flat he shared with his partner, Guy Burgess appeared on screen in January 1959 in his Eton tie and favourite camel hair overcoat – the very picture of an English toff.

He was appearing on Canadian television’s CBC, in what is believed to be the only time one of the infamous spy ring spoke in Moscow to a Western camera crew.

The Cambridge Five passed information about the UK to the Soviet Union throughout World War Two and into at least the 1950s.

After Burgess fled to the Soviet Union along with fellow Foreign Office diplomat and Cambridge Five member Donald Maclean in May 1951, nothing was heard of him for the next five years – although press interest and speculation in the UK and USA was particularly intense.

In February 1956 Burgess and Maclean resurfaced in Moscow when they met a couple of western journalists in a meeting organised by the KGB, but they otherwise kept a low profile. www.bbc.com/news/uk-31588063

CIA to Expand Cyberwar on the World CIA Director John O. Brennan is planning a major expansion of the agency’s cyber espionage capabilities as part of a broad restructuring of an intelligence service long defined by its human spy work, current and former U.S. officials said.

The proposed shift reflects a determination that the CIA’s approach to conventional espionage is increasingly outmoded amid the exploding use of smartphones, social media and other technologies.

U.S. officials said Brennan’s plans call for increased use of cyber capabilities in almost every category of operations — whether identifying foreign officials to recruit as CIA informants, confirming the identities of targets of drone strikes or penetrating Internet-savvy adversaries such as the Islamic State.

Several officials said that Brennan’s team has even considered creating a new cyber directorate — a step that would put the agency’s technology experts on equal footing with the operations and analysis branches that have been pillars of the CIA’s organizational structure for decades.

Soon to be Saint, Albania’s Mom Theresa, Still Crazy as hell after all these years In 1994, Hitchens, along with British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali, wrote an extremely critical British documentary on Mother Teresa, titled “Hell’s Angel.”

The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Mother Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalog of criticisms against Mother Teresa. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens himself rallied against the “cult of death and suffering.”

Pew: Religious Hostilities Reach Six Year High The share of countries with a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion reached a six-year peak in 2012, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. A third (33%) of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29% in 2011 and 20% as of mid-2007. Religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas. The sharpest increase was in the Middle East and North Africa, which still is feeling the effects of the 2010-11 political uprisings known as the Arab Spring.1 There also was a significant increase in religious hostilities in the Asia-Pacific region, where China edged into the “high” category for the first time. www.pewforum.org/2014/01/14/religious-hostilities-reach-six-year-high/

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Armed Women with CCWs in Michigan The number of women statewide who received or renewed concealed pistol licenses rose from 10,862 in 2010 to 25,418, a gain of 134 percent.

And while women still made up less than a quarter of the state’s new CPL holders last year, their numbers are growing faster than the number of Michigan men getting licenses. The number of newly issued or renewed CPL licenses for men surged 103 percent from 2010 to 2014. …

Statewide, 114,872 people obtained or renewed concealed pistol licenses in 2014, according to Michigan State Police statistics.

New Jersey Students Seize School Bosses’ Office As their sit-in at the office of their schools superintendent went into its third day, student activists in Newark, N.J. are firm in their demands that the superintendent should either speak with them about a controversial new program or resign.

The eight protesters, members of the Newark Student Union (NSU), say they will not leave until Superintendent Cami Anderson meets with them to discuss her One Newark program, which was implemented in September 2014, two and a half years after she was appointed by the state to run Newark’s struggling schools.

One Newark requires the city’s students, from kindergarten through high school, to reapply for acceptance at 100 different Newark schools, including some charter schools and non-traditional public schools. An algorithm decides which schools the students will attend.

Anderson says that the program will increase schooling options for students. The student activists say that the program forces them to attend schools in inconvenient locations and devalues the rights of black and Latino classmates.

This urgently needed collection exposes the neoliberal architecture of the Obama administration’s initiatives within and beyond education. These careful essays describe the economic, political, and philosophical formations underlying this administration’s market-driven approaches to teaching and learning, as well as revealing the ideological strategies through which elites sell their one-sided policies to the public. Carr and Porfilio have compiled an engaging and indispensable resource for researchers, educators, and activists interested in understanding and confronting the contemporary corporatization and instrumentalization of education. Noah De Lissovoy, Faculty of Education, University of Texas at Austin

Top Research Fellows are Protesting Across India When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru on Tuesday he met enthusiastic students and inspected research projects. He did not see the hundreds of research fellows who were wearing black arm bands in protest and in solidarity with thousands of their peers across the country. Their cause was to bring to the government’s notice the delay in a promised salary hike. The IISc protesters had considerately postponed expressing their outrage till after Modi left the venue.

Research students across India have been carrying out a concerted social media campaign for more than a year now to get their fellowship amounts increased. The Department of Science and Technology, the University Grants Commission and the Ministry of Human Resources Development are the three main agencies that grant fellowships to scholars across the country. In October last year, the DST finalised an increase in stipends that ranged from 55% for Junior Research Fellows from Rs 16,000 to Rs 25,000 to 66% for research associates from Rs 24,000 to Rs 40,000. In contrast, the starting salary for a graduate joining a mid- to large-size technology company in a city like Bengaluru will be between Rs 25,000 and Rs 40,0000 with an annual increment of 15% in a normal year. The DST memo was followed by a UGC announcement in December of a 55% hike in 15 fellowship schemes.

Steelworkers Still Striking Oil and Flying American Flags The United Steelworkers, which represents 30,000 U.S. oil workers, called on four more plants to join the biggest strike since 1980 as talks dragged on with Royal Dutch Shell Plc, negotiating a labor contract for oil companies.

The USW, with members at more than 200 refineries, fuel terminals, pipelines and chemical plants across the U.S., asked workers late Friday at Motiva Enterprises LLC’s Port Arthur refinery in Texas, the nation’s largest, to join a nationwide walkout on Saturday, and issued notices for three other plants to go on strike in 24 hours.

This brings the work stoppage — which began on Feb. 1 at nine sites from California to Texas and expanded to two BP Plc refineries in the Midwest a week later — to 12 refineries and 3 other facilities. The union has rejected seven contract offers from Shell, which is representing companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp.

An agreement would end a strike at U.S. plants that account for almost 20 percent of the country’s refining capacity. It’s the first national walkout of U.S. oil workers since 1980, when a work stoppage lasted three months. The USW represents workers at plants that together account for 64 percent of U.S. fuel output.

Pasco Protests Grow over killer coppers The rallying cry in Ferguson was “Hands up, don’t shoot!” In New York, it was “I can’t breathe!” In Pasco these days, the protest signs say things like, “It was just a rock!!!”

In a case with unmistakable echoes of Ferguson, Mo., and New York, demonstrators have gathered every day during the past week in front of City Hall to demand answers in the deadly police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican immigrant and former orchard worker who the authorities say was throwing rocks at officers.

CIA’s Randi Weingarten, also of AFT, easily steps in front of Opt Out “Movement”

To the Editor:

Chad Aldeman says he wants to keep the status quo — high-stakes annual testing in grades three to eight and once in high school.

In January, the American Federation of Teachers and the Center for American Progress issued a set of principles for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. At its core was a commitment to equity, and a robust accountability system that uses multiple measures and counts standardized tests once each in elementary, middle and high school.

Such a system would limit the high-stakes testing that is taking the joy out of learning and the innovation out of teaching, and frankly did not accomplish the intended purpose — to ensure that every child would be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

We believe that annual testing has a role: to provide information and diagnostics on student progress, but not as a basis for imposing high-stakes, punitive consequences. High-stakes testing shouldn’t drive federal policy; the needs of our children should. That’s why our plan takes the focus off high-stakes tests and returns the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to its original goal — equity.

Half of public school students live in poverty. More than 30 states fund public education below pre-recession levels. We need to level the playing field and ensure that all kids have equal access to things like computers, smaller class sizes, nurses and counselors — even when their communities can’t afford them.

The Reactionaries Who Easily Step inside the liberal anti-common core (silent on wars and capital) “movement” Among the most vocal opponents to the new standards are conservative, Tea Party Republicans, who are ideologically opposed to any expansion of the federal government—something they inaccurately equate to the Common Core initiative. And these politically motivated critics, who have rallied against a national system of learning standards for decades, have their own conspiracy theories about the Common Core, too. These include claims that the the standards will turn students gay, that it preaches an anti-American agenda, and that Muslim Brotherhood and communists shaped the content. …

Now, amid all the backlash, an unlikely subculture appears to be emerging in the anti-Common Core world: suburban parents. Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has taken note of the trend, who last November told a group of superintendents that “white suburban moms” were resisting the implementation of the Common Core. His theory? “All of a sudden … their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

I happen to live in a middle-class suburb outside of New York City—one that could easily be considered the capital of “white suburban moms.” And I’m realizing Duncan was on to something: Their wrath is real, and it’s based largely on misperception and widespread fearmongering perpetuated by the Tea Party skeptics and anxious state policymakers.

My friends and neighbors post links almost daily on Facebook to articles claiming the Common Core “curriculum,” as they perceive it, is destroying American youth. It has single-handedly taken recess away from kids, they argue. The upcoming tests demoralize kids and teachers. The new curricula and tests are an assault on an otherwise idyllic world where kids used to learn naturally—like those lucky children in Finland. Instead of actually instilling knowledge in students, teachers drill irrelevant facts into kids’ heads in order to game the testing results. And since the new exams will be taken on computers, hackers might even reveal the test results…

Teachers have fostered parental protests, too. Teachers’ unions were initially very supportive of the Common Core, and educators helped shape its goals. However, support from educators began to wane in the past year, when state legislatures started to create policies tying test scores to their pay, largely through new teacher-evaluation systems. The new stipulations have caused unrest among teachers across the country, including those in my suburban New Jersey school district, adding a new layer of politics to the Common Core. www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/suburbia-and-its-common-core-conspiracy-theories/385424/#disqus_thread

The Pearson Wing of Capitalists’ Education “The line between profit and profiteering can seem pretty fuzzy,” said Cathy Davidson, director of the Futures Initiative and a professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. “If you have an exclusive contract with a massive educational system, is that really just earning a profit, or are you profiting at the public’s expense?” Davidson said. “That’s the line many people, including myself, find very troubling.”

In an interview last spring, Pearson CEO John Fallon defended the company’s profits as appropriate, in part, because they finance investments to improve education around the world.

“We are a profit-making enterprise,” Fallon said. “We don’t exist unless we have the profits to sustain a billion dollars or more in research. But profits do not define us.”

Profit margins for Pearson’s work with public institutions are hard to determine. Where they can be tracked, they’re sizable.

A 2012 contract with California State University projected that Pearson would earn $12 million over five years for marketing, enrollment and student support services — a healthy markup considering the company estimated it would spend $5.5 million to provide those services. The deal fell apart two years later, in part, because of the university’s concern over costs.

And the business plan for Pearson’s 2010 joint marketing venture with an online public school in Florida projected gross profit margins would hit 85 percent within a few years. That deal, too, fell apart as sales didn’t come close to meeting expectations.

West Virginia Criminalizes Teaching Social Problems First Attention West Virginia civics teachers.

Legislation was introduced this week in the West Virginia House of Delegates (HB 2107) that would prohibit the teaching of “social problems, economics, foreign affairs, the United Nations, world government, socialism or communism until basic courses in American state and local geography and history are completed.”

Oklahoma Bans AP History An Oklahoma legislative committee overwhelmingly voted to ban Advanced Placement U.S. History class, persuaded by the argument that it only teaches students “what is bad about America.” Other lawmakers are seeking a court ruling that would effectively prohibit the teaching of all AP courses in public schools.

Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced “emergency” legislation “prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.” Fisher is part of a group called the “Black Robe Regiment” which argues “the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.” The group attacks the “false wall of separation of church and state.” The Black Robe Regiment claims that a “growing tide of special interest groups indoctrinating our youth at the exclusion of the Christian perspective.”

The San Diego School Board, Pleasantly Nestled in the US’ Most Militarized County, seeks a decrease in high stakes exams NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED,that the Board of Education of the San Diego Unified School District calls on the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the “No Child Left Behind Act,”eliminate the federally mandated, annual testing requirement in each of Grades 3 through 9, and at least once in Grades 9 through 12;promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability;and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators; and www.boarddocs.com/ca/sandi/Board.nsf/files/9TLNRB609850/$file/Revised%20Resolution%20ESEA%20Testing%202-10-15.pdf

Newest in the Detroit School Shell Game in Search of False Hope: Autonomous Schools The leader of the Education Achievement Authority unveiled a plan Tuesday to restructure all 15 direct-run and charter schools to operate autonomously in the state-run recovery district.

The plan proposed by Chancellor Veronica Conforme includes measures to streamline the EAA’s operations, provide school leaders with leadership training, hold schools and their leaders accountable for performance and improve support for principals and teachers.

She called it the beginning of a new chapter for the EAA.

“It’s time to act,” Conforme said during a special meeting of the district’s board of directors and executive committee. “We need to work on how best to move student achievement.”

Conforme told the board members she’s been talking with community members, Detroit Public Schools and charter operators for the past couple of months, “and we’re excited about changes to ensure children receive the education they deserve.”

She outlined four pillars of the rebuilding strategy:http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2015/02/17/education-achievement-authority-schools-restructuring-michigan/23567583/

Detroit Schools Mentor and City Councilman Inveigling Teen to Sext him (long live Otis Mathis)

PUGH: “But i wanna see your body. Front and back. So the video has to show everything. lol. #EVERYTHING.” (May 31, 2013)

TEEN: “It just feels weird :-” (June 1, 2013)

PUGH: “Strip down, then set up the cam, then walk around a little bit … Lemme know and I’ll bring your cash when I get the iPod. Please erase these messages bro.” (June 2, 2013)

With Fake Degree Deasy Gone, LAUSD discovers it cannot afford an Ipad for all

“I don’t believe we can afford a device for every student,” said Cortines, who added that the district never had a fleshed-out framework for how the devices would be used in the classroom and paid for over time.

About that Model Arab Spring in Libya When Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 by U.S. forces, Iraq War advocates boastfully celebrated the event as proof that they were right and used it to mock war opponents (Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, for instance, gleefully exploited the event to demand that Howard Dean admit his war opposition was wrong). When Muammar Gaddafi was forced by NATO bombing in August 2011 to flee Tripoli, advocates of U.S. intervention played the same game (ThinkProgress gleefully exploited the occasion to try to shame those who objected to the illegality of Obama’s waging the war even after Congress voted against its authorization: as though Gadaffi’s fleeing could render legal Obama’s plainly illegal intervention).

Once Gadaffi was brutally killed by a mob, advocates of intervention threw a giddy party for themselves, celebrating their own rightness and righteousness and declaring Libya a model for future Western interventions. Upon Gadaffi’s fleeing, The New York Times, which editorially supported the war, published a front-page article declaring: “U.S. Tactics in Libya May be a Model for Other Efforts.” While acknowledging that “it would be premature to call the war in Libya a complete success for United States interests,” the paper noted that events had given “Obama’s senior advisers a chance to claim a key victory for an Obama doctrine for the Middle East that had been roundly criticized in recent months as leading from behind.”

Leading war advocates such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Nick Kristof celebrated themselves as humanitarian visionaries and chided war opponents for being blinkered and overly cynical about the virtues of American force. British and French leaders descended upon Libya to strut around like some sort of conquering heroes, while American and Canadian officials held pompous war victory ceremonies. Hillary Clinton was downright sociopathic, gloating and cackling in an interview when told about Gadaffi’s death by mob: “We came, we saw, he died.” Democratic partisans were drowning in similar bravado (“Unlike the all-hat-no-cattle types we are increasingly seeing over there, [Obama] may take his time, but he does seem to get his man”).

CFR: IS is Not a Terrorist Group-The AQ Strategy Won’t Work (long, worth it)Consider first the tremendous U.S. military and intelligence campaign to capture or kill al Qaeda’s core leadership through drone strikes and Special Forces raids. Some 75 percent of the leaders of the core al Qaeda group have been killed by raids and armed drones, a technology well suited to the task of going after targets hiding in rural areas, where the risk of accidentally killing civilians is lower.

Such tactics, however, don’t hold much promise for combating ISIS. The group’s fighters and leaders cluster in urban areas, where they are well integrated into civilian populations and usually surrounded by buildings, making drone strikes and raids much harder to carry out. And simply killing ISIS’ leaders would not cripple the organization. They govern a functioning pseudo-state with a complex administrative structure. At the top of the military command is the emirate, which consists of Baghdadi and two deputies, both of whom formerly served as generals in the Saddam-era Iraqi army: Abu Ali al-Anbari, who controls ISIS’ operations in Syria, and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, who controls operations in Iraq. ISIS’ civilian bureaucracy is supervised by 12 administrators who govern territories in Iraq and Syria, overseeing councils that handle matters such as finances, media, and religious affairs. Although it is hardly the model government depicted in ISIS’ propaganda videos, this pseudo-state would carry on quite ably without Baghdadi or his closest lieutenants. …More below

ISIS does not need outside funding. Holding territory has allowed the group to build a self-sustaining financial model unthinkable for most terrorist groups. Beginning in 2012, ISIS gradually took over key oil assets in eastern Syria; it now controls an estimated 60 percent of the country’s oil production capacity. Meanwhile, during its push into Iraq last summer, ISIS also seized seven oil-producing operations in that country. The group manages to sell some of this oil on the black market in Iraq and Syria—including, according to some reports, to the Assad regime itself. ISIS also smuggles oil out of Iraq and Syria into Jordan and Turkey, where it finds plenty of buyers happy to pay below-market prices for illicit crude. All told, ISIS’ revenue from oil is estimated to be between $1 million and $3 million per day.

IS’ Base and Mass Appeal (and Saddam’s Revenge) Paris (AFP) – The Islamic State group has learned from the mistakes of past jihadist movements and established a near-impregnable base of support within Iraq and Syria with spectacular appeal to many of the world’s Sunni Muslims, a new book has warned.

The authors of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror”, published this month in the US, spoke to dozens of fighters and members of the group to understand its allure and how it justifies its brutal tactics.

In a telephone interview with AFP, one of the authors, Syrian-born journalist Hassan Hassan, said it was vital to understand that some of the group’s core religious beliefs were widely shared.

“It presents itself as an apocalyptic movement, talking about the end of days, the return of the caliphate and its eventual domination of the world,” said Hassan, who lives in Abu Dhabi where he works as a researcher for a think tank.

“These beliefs are not on the margins — they are absolutely mainstream. They are preached by mosques across the world, particularly in the Middle East.

“ISIS takes these existing beliefs and makes them more appealing by offering a project that is happening right now,” he said, using an alternative name for IS.

Obamagogue Selling Killer Drones Worldwide The Obama administration will permit the widespread export of armed drones for the first time, a step toward providing allied nations with weapons that have become a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy but whose remotely controlled power to kill is intensely controversial.

The new policy, announced Tuesday after a long internal review, is a significant step for U.S. arms policy as allied nations from Italy to Turkey to the Persian Gulf region clamor for the aircraft. It also is a nod to U.S. defense firms scrambling to secure a greater share of a growing global drone market.

Srian Jihadists offered ability to call in US Airstrikes The US and Turkey have reached a tentative deal to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels, according to officials from both countries, amid reports that commanders will be given authority to call in air strikes.
The Pentagon has previously said it was planning to send more than 400 troops, including special forces, to work with opposition forces at sites outside Syria.
At the same time The Wall Street Journal reported that some rebels will be equipped with pick-up trucks modified with mounted machine guns as well as radios for calling in US airstrikes – an approach modelled on that used to successful effect by Kurdish forces in Kobane last month.
American and Turkish officials said an agreement on training fighters on Turkish soil would be signed within days.
“Negotiations have been concluded and an agreement text will be signed with the US regarding the training of the Free Syrian Army in the coming period,” said Tanju Bilgic, Turkish foreign ministry spokesman, according to Reuters.. The US is planning to train some 5000 Syrian fighters a year under the plan as part of an effort to strengthen the fractured rebel movement against the government of President Bashar al-Assad and extremist groups.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the initial training would focus on helping rebels hold ground and resist fighters allied with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The first training sessions are to last between six and eight weeks. The training will focus on helping the rebel forces hold territory and counter Islamic State fightersﾗnot to take on the Syrian army.
Four to six-man units will be equipped with rugged Toyota Hilux vehicles, GPS and radios so they can identify targets for airstrikes. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11419243/Moderate-Syrian-rebels-to-be-given-power-to-call-in-US-air-strikes.html

Another good antidote to the coming deluge of lies about our win in Vietnam

I’m a US Army Vietnam combat veteran who served four tours in Vietnam (1967-68-69-70-71). Most of my tours were spent out in the field. For part of one tour I held a rear echelon clerical job that involved the use of intelligence documents up to my security clearance of Top Secret.

Whenever some one asks me to recommend a good non-fiction book about the Vietnam war, this book is my first recommendation followed by “Fire in the Lake”. I have bought about 30 copies of this book over the years to give to people I want to know the unvarnished truth about the war.

It is a tough book to read. The author, a US Army officer compiled the books content from after action reports written by officers who served in Vietnam. The author makes no secret of the fact that he did not serve in Vietnam.
He uses the words of the US Armys own officers to create a damning indictment of the US Armys conduct of the war. The Army continues to ask its serving officers to prepare the type of “after action” reports summerized in this book. It is the armys way of generating “lessons learned” educational materials to improve its performance in
present and future wars. This type of self criticism has greatly improved the conduct and caliber of US Army officers since the debacle of Vietnam www.amazon.com/Self-Destruction-Disintegration-United-States-Vietnam/dp/0393013464

Hillbillary’s Warmongering Record If reason and justice prevailed in this country, you’d think that the recent series of articles in the Washington Times concerning the U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects.

Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State at that time knew that Libya was no threat to the U.S. She knew that Muammar Gadhafi had been closely cooperating with the U.S. in combating Islamist extremism. She probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social base due in part to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively equitable distribution of oil income in Libya.

But she wanted to topple Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates but responding to the urgings of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason advertised at the time. (Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafy was preparing a massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in 1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international community” had failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by Clinton and other top officials, as a shameful precedent that must not be repeated. It had also been deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999, when he waged war on Serbia, grossly exaggerating the extent of carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect of “genocide” to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect gross cynicism.)

No, genocide was not the issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo. According to the Washington Times, high-ranking U.S. officials indeed questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario in Libya. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed about 400 rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found evidence for troops firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of mass killing. It did not have a good estimate on the number of civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence that most had fled. It had intelligence that Gadhafy had ordered that troops not fire on civilians but only on armed rebels….

Hillary, that supposedly astute stateswoman, believed that the Arab Spring was going to topple all the current dictators of the Middle East and that, given that, the U.S. needed to position itself as the friend of the opposition movements. Gadhafy was a goner, she reasoned, so shouldn’t the U.S. help those working towards his overthrow?

Of course the U.S. (or the combination of the U.S. and NATO) couldn’t just attack a sovereign state to impose regime change. It would, at any rate, have been politically damaging after the regime change in Iraq that had been justified on the basis of now well discredited lies. So the U.S. arm-twisted UNSC members to approve a mission to protect civilians in Libya against state violence. …While championing the rights of women and children, arguing that “it takes a village” to raise a child, Clinton has endorsed the bombing of villages throughout her public life. Here are some talking points for those appalled by the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency. www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/11/the-warmongering-record-of-hillary-clinton/

What Came Of Barbarized Detroit’s Walking Man When he was given a car? Robertson’s neighborhood is a cauldron of the poor, the defeated, the desperate. A landscape of charred houses, vacant lots, and busted bottles. It’s only a half-mile from the new light-rail line that will connect Midtown college kids with the revitalized downtown and its casinos, $12 cocktails, and lofts of young white professionals who still register their cars at their parents’ homes in the suburbs because insurance there is cheaper.

The rail will stop a half-mile short of Robertson’s Detroit, and it won’t connect him or the rest of the city to the bus terminal. In Robertson’s Detroit, the school year began with 100 children in a single kindergarten class. In Robertson’s Detroit, 18,000 families are in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure this year because they can’t afford the property taxes. In Robertson’s Detroit, unemployment hovers around 40 percent. There are no miracles here. That is, until Robertson went viral.

After that, everybody knew him. And everybody wanted something. The neighborhood started showing up on his porch with their palms out, though Robertson has yet to receive any of the money. His girlfriend — the one who owns the house and charges him 200 bucks for the bedroom — demanded a payout, he said. So did her ex-husband who lives with them. So did her adult son who lives with them. So did the other dude who lives with them.

One Element of Re-Colonizing Detroit: Arson Nationwide fire data support Detroit’s reputation among firehouses as the arson capital of the United States.

“It’s been that way for years. Every time you’d go to a seminar, you meet up with investigators nationwide and all they want to talk about is Detroit,” said Jon Bozich, who retired in 2001 as the chief of the city’s Arson Squad. “People used to say the arsons would only stop when the city runs out of fuel. It hasn’t happened yet.”

Detroit has averaged 3,800 to 6,000 suspicious building fires annually for years. Of those, about 700 to 1,000 are usually investigated and confirmed as arson, according to department statistics.

Contrary to the NYTimes, The Rich Have not gotten poorer The headline of a recent New York Times piece by The Upshot’s managing editor David Leonhardt is eye-opening and not at all subtle: “Inequality Has Actually Not Risen Since the Financial Crisis.” Unfortunately, the article that follows does not back up the sweeping conclusion of the headline.

In fact, the piece, based on a new study of income inequality by George Washington University economist Stephen Rose, is misleading, and its headline is flat-out wrong. The story has two huge problems: It fails to mention wealth inequality at all, and the income inequality data on which it is based does not support the story’s breathless “everything you know about inequality in America is wrong” opening lines.

The first problem is the big one: There’s a huge distinction between income inequality and wealth inequality. Leonhardt knows this, and throughout the piece takes care to note that he is referring to income inequality, not wealth inequality. But he never explains why he’s using that modifier, which may confuse some less-knowledgeable readers, if they even notice. At times, he seems to use this omission in the service of the broad headline. www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/17/inequality-upshot-new-york-times_n_6702264.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Government Motors gives Execs $9.6 Million General Motors Co. CEO Mary Barra is one of a dozen executives recently granted company stock worth $9.6 million, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A Feb. 11 SEC filing states Barra will receive 79,639 restricted shares of GM stock as part of a long-term incentive compensation program for top executives.At Friday’s closing price of $37.62, the shares were valued at nearly $3 million. The number of shares, part of her yearly compensation, is up from 69,214 shares for 2014.

Overall, more than 254,000 shares were granted to 12 executives. The shares will vest annually in three equal installments beginning on Feb. 11, 2016, meaning they can’t immediately be sold.

Detroit: The Worst City For Child Poverty–still etroit continues to have more children living in extreme poverty than any of the nation’s 50 largest cities, according to a national report released Thursday.

More than 59 percent of Detroit children lived in poverty in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the national Kids Count report, an annual project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The number of poor Detroit kids increased 34 percent since 2006, according to the study, which was partially funded by the Skillman Foundation.

It’s part of a statewide problem in Michigan, where one in four children live in extreme poverty, according to the report. The number of Michigan children mired in poverty increased 35 percent over six years, to nearly 25 percent.

More than a half-million Michigan kids were found to be living in poverty, defined as $23,600 or less a year for a two-parent family of four. Among African American children, 48 percent were living in poverty statewide.

When Americans Lynched Mexicans THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.

One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.

Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested. www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/opinion/when-americans-lynched-mexicans.html?smid=fb-share

Solidarity for Never

For this, the Long March? China Pumping out billionaires China’s world-best stock market rally made January the busiest month for IPOs in a year. It also created a bundle of new billionaires.

In the first six weeks of 2015, the world’s second-biggest economy hatched about two dozen billionaires, many of whom are riding initial public offerings that investors are driving to their daily price-trading limits — a frenzy that harkens back to the IPO market of the late 1990s. Among the high-fliers are an airline, a video-game developer and a drug-store chain.

“IPOs have become very hot investment products in China,” said Ronald Wan, chief China adviser at Hong Kong-based Asian Capital Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong-based corporate advisory firm. “So all the controlling IPO shareholders become very rich afterwards — they become billionaires.”

After a 14-month standstill beginning in October 2012, IPOs resumed in China last year. More than 20 new stocks started trading in January, the most since the same month a year earlier. The offerings follow a 49 percent rise in the Shanghai Composite Index, the world’s best-performing index in 2014. While the Shanghai index is little changed this year, the Shenzhen Composite Index, the smaller of China’s two stock exchanges, is up 12 percent in U.S. dollar terms, Asia’s highest returns and trailing just Russia and Saudi Arabia globally. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-16/china-churning-out-billionaires-like-it-s-1999-with-soaring-ipos

AFT Tries to Lock Teachers into Dues Paying TEN year Contract. Teachers sue/win The Michigan Employment Relations Commission ruled Friday that teachers in the Taylor Public School District are not bound by their contract to pay union dues for the next 10 years, saying the provision violates the state’s right-to-work law.

Michigan’s law, which took effect in 2013, makes it illegal to require employees to join a union or pay fees comparable to union dues as a condition of employment. A number of teachers unions negotiated new contracts shortly before the law took effect to avoid falling under the measure, which makes financially supporting a union voluntary.

Syriza HoneyMoon Ending in Greece as “Compromises” Spring out With a deal, of sorts, to keep Greece in the eurozone, prime minister Alexis Tsipras marked his first month in office this weekend acknowledging that only now does the hard work begin.

Facing a 48-hour deadline to produce a list of reforms that could make or break his insolvent country’s future, the anti-austerity leader admitted the honeymoon was over for a government that had sent ripples of hope through Europe.

In a sombre address, hours after a dramatic meeting of euro group finance ministers in Brussels, Tsipras said that, while Athens under the stewardship of his radical left Syriza party had for the first time embarked on “real negotiations” with its creditors, a “long and difficult ” struggle lay ahead.

AMERICAN AND BRITISHspies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.

In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

NACLA on Washington’s Spying Eyes the U.S. government maintains its uneasy silence about the kidnapping and probable murder of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico—or, for that matter, about the estimated 100 thousand Mexicans killed since the recommitment to the drug war in 2006—it is worth remembering that the United States maintains the largest and most elaborate international surveillance network in the world. Which, then, is the more troubling interpretation of events: that U.S. State Department and National Security Agency (NSA) officials know who is responsible for these horrific crimes but are choosing not to say, or that despite untold billions of dollars of investment in spy programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Washington still has no clue?

Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance practices sparked outrage around the world, but nowhere more than in Latin America, where U.S. efforts to project its influence have long been concentrated. Anger rose as the scoops piled up: that the NSA’s Fairview program colluded with local telecom companies to steal Brazilians’ Internet and phone data; that secret NSA listening stations were operating out of Panama City, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City; that the Agency had tapped into the personal emails and texts of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderón; that the spying targeted not only drug trafficking and suspected terrorism but also corporate matters and everyday citizens’ private lives. Now that the dust has settled, we should ask: Did the NSA disclosures, and the criticism they provoked, represent a historic break in hemispheric relations? Or was this just business as usual, another insult added to the ongoing injury of U.S. hegemony in the Americas?

On the one hand, the NSA and other U.S. government branches, from the Central Intelligence Agency to the State Department, have been collecting voluminous data on Latin American internal affairs since their inception. nacla.org/article/washington%E2%80%99s-prying-eyes

US Embedding Spyware on Computers (like reporters in war zones) The United States has found a way to permanently embed surveillance and sabotage tools in computers and networks it has targeted in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and other countries closely watched by American intelligence agencies, according to a Russian cybersecurity firm.

In a presentation of its findings at a conference in Mexico on Monday, Kaspersky Lab, the Russian firm, said that the implants had been placed by what it called the “Equation Group,” which appears to be a veiled reference to the National Security Agency and its military counterpart, United States Cyber Command.

It linked the techniques to those used in Stuxnet, the computer worm that disabled about 1,000 centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. It was later revealed that Stuxnet was part of a program code-named Olympic Games and run jointly by Israel and the United States.

Kaspersky’s report said that Olympic Games had similarities to a much broader effort to infect computers well beyond those in Iran. It detected particularly high infection rates in computers in Iran, Pakistan and Russia, three countries whose nuclear programs the United States routinely monitors.

Some of the implants burrow so deep into the computer systems, Kaspersky said, that they infect the “firmware,” the embedded software that preps the computer’s hardware before the operating system starts. It is beyond the reach of existing antivirus products and most security controls, Kaspersky reported, making it virtually impossible to wipe out.

Gathering of the Coppers: 7th World Congress of Education International Education International’s 7th World Congress, which is held every four years, is the supreme governing body of the organisation. The next Congress will be held in Ottawa, Canada, in the Ottawa Convention Centre (OCC) from July 21st to July 26th, 2015. The Congress provides an opportunity for representatives of EI affiliates from all over the globe to meet and decide on the policies and strategies which the organisation will implement for the following four year period. It helps to strengthen the bonds of solidarity between their members — teachers and education workers from across the world. Delegates consider the major contemporary issues affecting their organisations, the international teacher trade union movement, the trade union movement generally, and the on-going struggle to achieve quality public education for all.

Awards

A highlight of every World Congress is the presentation of the EI Awards, when Education International honours outstanding individuals.

The Albert Shanker Police Agent Education Award is given to a teacher or education employee in recognition of his or her personal contribution to education.

The Mary Hatwood Futrell (ex NEA boss) Human and Trade Union Rights Award is given to a national or local union leader or activist who has undertaken courageous and exemplary action to defend and promote human and trade union rights. www.ei-ie.org/congress7/

UTLA Moves to “legalize” a Strike After seven months and 18 rounds of cantankerous contract talks, Los Angeles Unified administrators and leaders of the district’s 35,000-member teachers union finally found common ground Wednesday when United Teachers Los Angeles made its first legally required step toward a strike.

The so-called “impasse” was declared by UTLA, after negotiators emerged from talks Wednesday divided by more than $800 million per year, including 3.5 percentage points in pay raises and roughly $500 million in funding for additional teachers to reduce class sizes.

In a statement titled “LAUSD Agrees With UTLA’s Declaration of Impasse,” Superintendent Ramon Cortines welcomed the legal action as a chance to reach an agreement in front of a mediator.

“I’ve been disappointed and frustrated by the lack of progress toward an agreement,” Cortines said. “It’s my hope that the appointment of a mediator will lead to an expeditious settlement that ultimately supports our students and the district at large.”

A mediator will be called in if California’s top labor authority, the Public Employment Relations Board, agrees with UTLA’s case for an impasse. Should a mediator fail to resolve the conflict, a fact-finding panel will be formed with one UTLA representative, one LAUSD representative and one neutral party. While the panel will recommend settlement terms, neither side is bound by those recommendations. www.dailybreeze.com/social-affairs/20150218/lausd-teachers-union-moves-closer-toward-a-strike

The Magical Mystery Tour

How Come God Needs A State, a Bank, and an Interpreter? Open the Vatican Bank! Francis, who has worked hard to carve out a reputation as a reformer, is facing one of his most daunting challenges when it comes to the Catholic Church’s finances, particularly the Vatican Bank. Since World War II — when the bank was created as the equivalent of the Federal Reserve combined with a commercial bank — it has operated with few checks and balances. Over the decades, it has become embroiled in seemingly endless scandals that include questions about wartime profiteering with Nazis, gigantic business schemes and political slush funds. The Vatican did not even have a law against money laundering until 2011. Some previous popes — including Paul VI in the 1960s and John Paul II in the 1980s — had promised upon their election to tame the church’s unruly finances. But they were inevitably defeated by entrenched powers inside Vatican City who pretended to embrace reforms while working surreptitiously to maintain the bank’s outlier status. The issue facing the church is whether Francis, riding a remarkable wave of international popularity and goodwill, can accomplish what frustrated his predecessors. www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-posner-vatican-bank-20150215-story.html

Powerful Psycho Zionist Urges Jews to Leave Europe for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday that his government was encouraging a “mass immigration” of Jews from Europe, reopening a contentious debate about Israel’s role at a challenging time for European Jews and a month before Israel’s national elections.

Pennsylvania Judge Gets 28 years for selling kids to jails Disgraced Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for conspiring with private prisons to sentence juvenile offenders to maximum sentences for bribes and kickbacks which totaled millions of dollars. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution.

In the private prison industry the more time an inmate spends in a facility, the more of a profit is reaped from the state. Ciavearella was a figurehead in a conspiracy in the state of Pennsylvania which saw thousands of young men and women unjustly punished and penalized in the name of corporate profit.

According to allgov.com Ciavearella’s cases from 2003 – 2008 were reviewed by a special investigative panel and later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and it was found that upwards of 5,000 young men and women were denied their constitutional rights, and therefore all of their convictions were dismissed and were summarily released.

Inmates to be Transferred after rebellion in TX prison A federal prison in South Texas over the next week will transfer up to 2,800 inmates to other institutions in the area, after a riot on Friday rendered the facility uninhabitable, an official said.

Inmates at the Willacy County Correctional Center, who took control of the prison using pipes as weapons, were compliant on Saturday evening as negotiations with the authorities continued.

Ed Ross, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said in a phone call that about 2,800 low-security offenders and illegal immigrants will be transferred to other facilities.

“Staff are continuing to communicate with the inmate population in an effort to regain complete control of the facility, which is now uninhabitable due to damage caused by the inmate population,” the bureau said in a statement.

]]>http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=159300Rouge Forum Dispatch: In the US, History is Unpredictablehttp://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=15841
http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=15841#commentsSun, 15 Feb 2015 07:36:18 +0000http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=15841“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” (Orwell, 1984)

We Say Fight Back!

“The prize for best South African documentary went to Rehad Desai’s Miners Shot Down, which also won the Amnesty Intl. (Durban) Human Rights Award, accompanied by a prize of R10,000 ($951) sponsored by the Artists for Human Rights Trust. The film was selected for its profoundly moving portrayal of the Marikana miners’ massacre.”

Workers Mobilize for Self Defense in Guerrero A former cattle trader juggles two cellphones to direct truckloads of armed volunteers who have replaced the meager police forces across a swath of small towns.

A potential mayoral candidate plans to campaign almost entirely from his apartment, risking little of the usual glad-handing with voters on the street, because he fears for his life.

Protesters rattle the gates of military bases and have evicted mayors from about half the state’s town halls.

After the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college last September — believed to be the victims of an alliance among drug gangs, local politicians and the municipal police — activist groups have sworn to disrupt the June elections in the name of the missing students.

“The no-election movement could gather strength,” said Juan Angulo Osorio, the editor of El Sur, a Guerrero newspaper. “It’s seen as the only way to punish the politicians.”

Fueling the anger is evidence that neither the state of Guerrero nor the federal government acted on repeated warnings of the connection between a local cartel and the mayor of the city of Iguala, where police officers fired at and killed some students before dozens of them disappeared.

Suspending Brian Williams is a very healthy event in the history of television news. I do not think it should stop with Mr. Williams. The entire industry has been corrupted by news managers and performers who have made a travesty of what once was an honorable enterprise.

Purging the industry of those who have corrupted it would help restore confidence. The next to go should be the news managers, nationally and locally, who have transformed the industry from honest and accurate news gathering to a charade, a clown show.

ED RABEL

Charleston, W.Va.

The writer is a former correspondent for NBC News.

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Justin Williams Speaks to the Uniondale BOE My two oldest children, one in 9th grade, the other in 4thgrade, do not attend school here in Uniondale. They love going to school. A big reason why is because their parents understand the intricacies of the educational system. Another reason is that we, as parents, do not allow our children to take any tests that are used for the purpose of evaluating their teachers. This includes all state exams given in grades 3 through 8. This also includes locally designed exams given in K through grade 11 at the beginning and end of each school year, commonly referred to as SLOs. In addition, I do not allow my 9th grader to take any field test exams, which are practice tests used to help the State Education Department determine future questions for the high school Regents examinations. My children will only take exams in school that impact their report card grades and academic transcripts. My job as a father and husband is to protect my family. Protecting our children from excessive, abusive testing should be of paramount concern to every single person in this room and in our community. But why? www.facebook.com/notes/10153024894618389/

San Diego State, Hits Violence Jackpot California state auditor Elaine Howle strongly criticized San Diego State University last June for not having a so-called confidential advocate for victims of sexual violence. “When UC Berkeley establishes its new position, all of the four universities we reviewed except San Diego State will have a confidential resource advocate in place,” noted Howle’s report. SDSU officials initially balked, saying, “the advocate duties are dispersed across campus,” then later told auditors that the university was “in the process of identifying a current employee or, as necessary, a funding source” for the position.

In the meantime, a spate of rapes and other sexually related incidents broke out on campus, drawing national headlines. Two weeks ago, the school finally announced it has managed to come up with “a full-time sexual assault victim advocate on campus.” The $200,000 annual tab is being funded by a three-year grant from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “It will also allow for a part-time police officer dedicated to sexual assault prevention, training and investigation.” In addition, “The grant will also allow the university to expand its Sexual Violence Task Force to include representatives from community agencies and local law enforcement.” What happens when the grant runs out was not mentioned. www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/feb/11/radar-violence-jackpot/

That Pesky Ipad Problem–Defeating filters, watching porn The Encinitas Union School District failed to install filters on iPads it sent home with elementary school students, making it more likely children can use the devices to download inappropriate content, a group of parents told the school board Tuesday.

The parents also complained that Superintendent Tim Baird has been aware of the problem for a long time, but has failed to take any action.

In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Baird said he is addressing the concerns — the district is already testing an app called “Meraki”that may ultimately be used to block inappropriate content on the iPads.

“It’s a relatively new tool, but we expect to push out different filters to the devices,” Baird said…. The district has about 5,400 iPads in its so-called one-to-one digital learning program. The devices were purchased after voters in 2010 approved Proposition P, a $44.2 million bond measure the district said would be used to acquire, construct, upgrade and equip school facilities. In 2012, Encinitas Union launched its iPad program, equipping each third- through sixth-grade student with a device. Since then, this district has put iPads into the hands of all of its 5,400 students, at a cost of $2.7 million.http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/feb/11/encinitas-parents-worried-by-content-downloads-on/

Taylorism in Capital’s Schools Doesn’t work for kids—or does it? A new University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways from 1999-2006. There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined.

The time spent in child-selected activity dropped by more than one-third. Direct instruction and testing increased. Moreover, more teachers reported holding all children to the same standard.

How can teachers hold all children to the same standards when they are not all the same? They learn differently, mature at different stages – they just are not all the same especially at the age of 4-6.

“Top Teacher” Quits Stacie Starr, a veteran Elyria, Ohio, teacher who was chosen as the winner of the “Live with Kelly and Michael” 2014 Top Teacher Search, announced her retirement on Monday, citing the increasing pressures on students and teachers under the mandated Common Core standards.

The Chronicle-Telegram reported:

Gasps of disbelief followed the announcement made during an education forum aimed at unraveling for parents the intricacies of the standardized testing system. Starr was at the podium, delivering a talk on how special education students are suffering under the new system based on Common Core standards and more rigorous assessments. She said as a veteran intervention specialist at Elyria High School, she could no longer watch silently from within the confines of a structured school day.

High Stakes Arne Says We can Teach (in segregated schools) Our way out of Capital’s Racism Ferguson, I also saw a willingness to reflect and a commitment to long-term action. While there is a great deal of hurt and anger, there’s also great interest among the young people, community leaders and educators to work together to turn around a very tough situation—to ensure trust and to build strong relationships among law enforcement and other officials and the communities they serve. The students I met with at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy High School, for example, are reviewing their old classroom notes on the civil rights movement of the 1960s in hopes of organizing their own movement toward social justice in 2015. They’re seeing and sensing that they are a part of rewriting the history of their own community.

Like civil rights leaders who came before them, these students and educators see education as a means of addressing inequities and injustices. They noted that they are tired of the disparities in their local school systems—whether it’s a lack of access to quality early-childhood education, to Advanced Placement classes, to adequately funded schools, to strong instruction or to after-school programs. Education is—and must continue to be—the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture and privilege. Educational opportunity represents a chance at a better life, and no child should be denied that chance. Where our children lack that opportunity, it’s not just heartbreaking; it is educational malpractice. It is morally bankrupt, and it is destructive to our nation’s future. I don’t believe that we’re going to solve the challenges in Ferguson and other communities from Washington, D.C., alone, but we can be part of the solution if we listen closely to the people living in these communities. Making things better for kids, their families and their schools will take all of us working together. We can—and we must—get to a better place. www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/02/education_secretary_arne_duncan_visits_ferguson.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

above, Sir No Sir, a great corrective to the advancing Vietnam Anniversary lies

Against the Lies Coming about our victory in Vietnam “Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however, if handled right, –might–offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided–which we could offer to do at the conference table.” (Pentagon Papers v4 p43)

“We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot–if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene. Now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning so they started adding Willie Peter (white phosphorus) to make it burn better. It will even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough. It’ll keep burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning. (“Vietnam Inc by Phillip Jones Griffin)

Christian Appy on Teaching the Vietnam Wars In the post-Vietnam decades, our culture has buried so much of the history once considered essential to any debate about that most controversial of all American wars that little of substance remains. Still, oddly enough, most of the 180 students who take my Vietnam War class each year arrive deeply curious. They seem to sense that the subject is like a dark family secret that might finally be exposed. All that most of them know is that the Sixties, the war years, were a “time of turmoil.” As for Vietnam, they have few cultural markers or landmarks, which shouldn’t be surprising. Even Hollywood—that powerful shaper of historical memory—stopped making Vietnam movies long ago. Some of my students have stumbled across old films likeApocalypse Now and Platoon, but it’s rare for even one of them to have seen either of the most searing documentaries made during that war, In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds. Such relics of profound antiwar fervor simply disappeared from popular memory along with the antiwar movement itself.

On the other hand, there is an advantage to the fact that students make it to that first class without strong convictions about the war. It means they can be surprised, even shocked, when they learn about the war’s wrenching realities and that’s when real education can begin. For example, many students are stunned to discover that the US government, forever proclaiming its desire to spread democracy, actually blocked Vietnam’s internationally sanctioned reunification election in 1956 because of the near certainty that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming winner.

They’re even more astonished to discover the kind of “free-fire zone” bloodshed and mayhem the U.S. military unleashed on the South Vietnamese countryside. Nothing shocks them more, though, than the details of the My Lai massacre, in which American ground troops killed, at close range, more than 500 unarmed, unresisting, South Vietnamese civilians

What did Brian Williams Lie About? Everything. He was Always embedded. Brian Williams, the talking hair-do at NBC Nightly News, is stepping down for a few days after reluctantly admitting he lied about being in a helicopter that was shot down while reporting in Iraq. Williams apologized, stating he was mistaken about the events that took place 12 years ago and that his chopper wasn’t hit and didn’t make an emergency landing in the Iraq desert. His real intentions, Williams exclaimed, were only to recognize the heroics of our “brave military men and women”.

Even so, Williams is still mangling the facts. He contends his helicopter was right behind the one that was actually damaged and that both crafts landed together after being shot at. In reality, the helicopter Williams was on landed up to an hour after the first one made a crash landing.

Like many CounterPunch readers, I’ve never taken Williams as a serious journalist. The fabricated story of the chopper he was in being “forced down after being hit by an RPG” took place while he was embedded with U.S. forces in the early days of the Iraq invasion. It was these embedded reporters, with few exceptions, that presented a very distorted view of events that were taking place on the ground. As Patrick Cockburn, one of the great unembedded journalists, writes, “[embedding] leads reporters to see the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts primarily in military terms, while the most important developments are political or, if they are military, may have little to do with foreign forces.”

IS Closes in on Anbar n Iraqi tribal leader said Saturday that ISIS militants are gaining ground in Anbar province, predicting a “collapse within hours” of Iraqi army forces there if tribal forces withdraw.

Sheikh Naim al-Gaoud, a Sunni Muslim leader of the Albu Nimr tribe, called for more U.S. intervention — including ground troops, arming tribes directly or at least pressuring the Iraqi government to give the tribes more firepower.

While U.S. officials have said that ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State, is on the defensive in Iraq and Syria, al-Gaoud says that’s definitely not the case where he is.

“In Anbar, we are losing ground, not gaining,” he said.

Thousands of families had been under siege in the town of Jubbat al-Shamiya until getting help Friday from U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and Iraqi forces, according to al-Gaoud.

But he said Iraqi troops had pulled out of Jubbat al-Shamiya on Saturday, at which time ISIS was shelling the town.

Key base attacked

Anbar province is just west of Baghdad, meaning a decisive ISIS victory would put militants on the footsteps of the Iraqi capital. It’s home to the strategic Ayn al-Assad Air Base, which came under attack Friday.

They’re Everywhere! ISIS is Coming! ISIS is Coming! From the same people who brought us the Shah, Saddam, Mubarek, Karzai, Diem, Pinochet and many more The Islamic State is expanding beyond its base in Syria and Iraq to establish militant affiliates in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, American intelligence officials assert, raising the prospect of a new global war on terror.

The Governing Coup in the Fake Ukraine The new cabinet includes Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, the chief executive of a private-equity fund and a former U.S. diplomat, as well as two other nonnatives: Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius, a former investment banker from Lithuania; and Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili, who held a similar post in Georgia. …

The government’s immediate task is to stabilize Ukraine’s shaky finances. The currency, the hryvnia, has lost nearly half of its value against the dollar this year and the central bank’s foreign-currency reserves are at their lowest in almost a decade, at $12.6 billion. Ms. Jaresko, a Harvard graduate who grew up near Chicago, said the cabinet would prepare a budget by Dec. 20.

Ukraine is dependent on the International Monetary Fund for financing, and officials and analysts say it will need more than the current $17-billion program from the lender.

European Union finance ministers will discuss Ukraine’s financing needs at a meeting Dec. 9, in particular what additional loans the bloc could give on top of €1.6 billion ($2 billion) already approved, diplomats said Tuesday. No decisions are expected, they said, but talks will focus on possible conditions.

Ukraine has requested an additional €2 billion for 2015—an amount that EU officials have privately said is probably too high.

Ths US’ Gangster Military Censures Three Admirals in Massive Corruption Scam The Navy announced Tuesday that it has censured three admirals for ethics violations as part of a historic corruption scandal that has already tarred several other high-ranking officers and is threatening to spread further through the ranks.

Navy officials said the three admirals improperly accepted “extravagant dinners” and other gifts from Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian defense contractor who made a fortune by supplying Navy vessels at Asian ports until his arrest in 2013.

The three officers — Rear Adm. Michael Miller, Rear Adm. Terry Kraft and Rear Adm. David Pimpo — were sanctioned for misconduct committed in 2006 and 2007, when they were assigned to the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier strike group.

The admirals’ actions surfaced during a long-running federal bribery investigation into Francis’s company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia. Prosecutors with the Justice Department decided not to press criminal charges against the three admirals but referred the cases to the Navy for further review.

Francis, known as “Fat Leonard” in Navy circles for his girth, pleaded guilty in federal court last month and could face up to 25 years in prison. He admitted to bribing “scores” of Navy officials with prostitutes, envelopes stuffed with cash, luxury travel and other enticements in exchange for classified information that he used to cinch federal contracts.

How’s the VA Doing? “That’s characteristic of your glossing over the extraordinary problems confronted by your department,” Coffman told McDonald. “This is a department mired in bureaucratic incompetence and corruption. I fundamentally believe … when this president ends his term, you will not have made a dent in changing the culture of VA.”

McDonald called that attack “highly offensive” and told Coffman he was more concerned about reliving years-old missteps than fixing problems.

“I’ve been here six months,” McDonald said. “You’ve been here longer than I have. If there’s a problem in Denver, you own it more than I do.”

Who Lost Yemen? The United States, Britain and France moved to close their embassies in Yemen on Wednesday, increasing the isolation of Shiite rebels who have seized power. In a show of bravado against the Americans, the rebels seized the cars of U.S. diplomats left at the airport on the way out.

At the same time, the rebels — known as the Houthis — attacked demonstrators holding protests against their power grab in various parts of the capital, Sanaa, witnesses said. The fighters beat protesters and stabbed them with knives, arrested more than a dozen.

The increasing turmoil comes almost four years to the day since the start of Yemen’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising that ousted the longtime autocratic ruler but then opened a political transition that crumbled between the country’s grinding forces of tribal politics, sectarian divisions, al-Qaida militancy and succession movements.

The crisis reached a new peak when the Houthis — widely believed to have Iranian support — overran the capital Sanaa late last year. They have since taken over larger parts of the country. In January, the rebels put U.S.-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and all his Cabinet ministers under house arrest, leading to their resignations. Subsequently, the Houthis, who are followers of the Shiite Zaydi sect in the Sunni-majority Yemen, dissolved parliament and declared they were taking over the government. www.navytimes.com/story/military/2015/02/11/us-france-and-uk-close-embassies-in-yemen-amid-turmoil/23224081/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Detroit’s First Week of February: 2 Dead. 26 homes. 2 buildings In the first week of February, fires claimed the lives of two brothers, injured at least three others and damaged or destroyed 26 houses and two commercial buildings.

During that time, five fire rigs malfunctioned on the way to fires or at the scene, and at least two fire hydrants were broken, causing more extensive damage.

And that was a slow week.

During the first seven days of February, there were 28 structure fires, compared to 63 during the first week of January. Traditionally, February is the slowest month for fires in Detroit.

A dumpster at the Eastern Market was brimming with scores of rotting lamb carcasses Sunday afternoon, plainly visible to motorists along Gratiot Avenue in what is a clear violation of state law and a risk to public health. The Bodies of Dead Animals Act of 1982 requires carcasses to be burned, buried or passed off to a licensed processor within 24 hours of being slaughtered.

Witnesses said the dumpster has been full of lamb carcasses for several weeks – or longer – but it’s unclear how often they are being picked up. Images from Google Maps appear to show the dumpster full of animal carcasses in October 2014.

Hell’s Zip Code: West Fresno By almost any measure, the quality of life in West Fresno is far from ideal. Though it is located in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most plentiful sources of fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables, this community is plagued by environmental and health problems. As one indication, a 2012 study found that life expectancy for residents of West Fresno was nearly 10 years lower than for people living in Northeast Fresno, about a dozen miles away, and nearly 20 years lower than for people living in Huron, a small city about an hour’s drive away. As another, an estimated one in four middle school children in the area have asthma, more than double the state average.

Moreover, an exhaustive study of 8,000 census tracts in the state by the California Environmental Protection Agency, identified West Fresno as the most disadvantaged place to live in the state, based on 12 pollution and environmental factors and seven population characteristics. Half of California’s 10 most disadvantaged census tracts are located in the West Fresno ZIP code, 93706.

Mexico’s Rich and Connected buying US Homes In the fall of 2013, one of Mexico’s top housing officials posted an item on Twitter about an advertising campaign promoting mortgages for low-income Mexicans. The campaign’s message was simple: “The most important thing in life is in your house.”

It carried the tag line, “Homes with value.”

The official, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, knows something about homes with value, especially across the border.

Over the years, he and members of his immediate family — starting with his father, José Murat Casab, a former governor of Oaxaca — have bought at least six properties in the United States, including two condominiums near a ski resort in Utah, another at the beach in South Texas and at least one in Manhattan, according to records and interviews. In New York, José Murat’s children have also lived for periods of time in one of the more modest condos at the luxurious Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park.

Ownership of the homes was often obscured through variations on family names listed on deeds or through shell companies, according to records examined by The New York Times. In fact, on the day the younger Mr. Murat tweeted about the housing program, public filings in Florida recorded the transfer of a $750,000 Boca Raton condo that had been purchased in his wife’s name to an entity called IMRO 2013 Trust.

Investigators in Washington State were reviewing video taken with a cellphone that appears to show the fatal police shooting of a man who threw rocks at police officers before running across a crowded intersection, law enforcement officials said.

The man, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, died during his confrontation on Tuesday with police officers in Pasco, who were responding to a call about a man throwing rocks at cars in a grocery store parking lot, the police said. The 22-second video, taken by a motorist, was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. The police said investigators were reviewing the video but could not confirm its authenticity.

“I have maintained from the day of my arrest that my case was never about leaking,” he said. “My case was about torture. The C.I.A. never forgave me for talking about torture.”

He said that although he regretted being separated from his family while he was in prison, he was proud to have played a role in exposing torture. “And I would do it all over again,” he said….

“I have maintained from the day of my arrest that my case was never about leaking,” he said. “My case was about torture. The C.I.A. never forgave me for talking about torture.”

He said that although he regretted being separated from his family while he was in prison, he was proud to have played a role in exposing torture. “And I would do it all over again,” he said. ….

When Mr. Kiriakou pleaded guilty, David H. Petraeus, who was then the C.I.A. director, praised the conviction. “Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy,” he said.

A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

He was “highly suspicious” of the government’s attempt to declare the whole lot of the photos dangerous. “It’s too easy and too meaningless,” he said.

Since 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting for the release of photos from military investigations into prisoner abuse beyond those that were leaked from Abu Ghraib. The additional pictures reportedly show sexual assault, soldiers posing with dead bodies, and other offenses. The exact number of photos has not been disclosed in court, though former Senator Joe Lieberman has previously said that there are nearly 2,100.

Freed From Nazis, into hands of Patton I ran across Harrison’s report a few years ago while researching a book on the flight of Nazis to the United States after the war. As I examined the path the Nazis took out of Europe, I struggled to understand how so many of them had made it to America so easily while so many Holocaust survivors were left behind.

One answer came in a copy of Gen. George S. Patton’s handwritten journal. In one entry from 1945, Patton, who oversaw the D.P. operations for the United States, seethed after reading Harrison’s findings, which he saw — quite accurately — as an attack on his own command.

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote. He complained of how the Jews in one camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts,” and he told of taking his commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to tour a makeshift synagogue set up to commemorate the holy day of Yom Kippur.

NEA Bosses Love Obamagogue’ s Education Budget (wars?what wars? tests? what tests?) President Barack Obama’s budget request for federal fiscal year (FY) 2016 (school year 2016-17) proposes to replace the stringent spending caps currently in place as a result of sequestration. Doing so would free up additional dollars for the President’s domestic priorities, especially education. ED’s discretionary funding would increase by $3.6 billion (+5.4 percent) compared to the current fiscal year funding. Funding for elementary and secondary education, including special education and career and technical education, would increase by $3.3 billion (+8.8 percent) compared to 2015.

“Since taking office, President Obama has consistently called for investing in education,” said NEA President Lily Eskelsen García in a statement applauding Obama’s budget’s priorities as smart and pragmatic. “He knows what educators know: An investment in education is a direct investment in our students and our nation’s future. That’s why educators have for years called for funding increases to support programs that improve opportunities for all students. We are pleased the Obama administration is leaning in and investing much-needed resources to help high-needs students in his latest budget.” http://view.email.nea.org/?j=fe8a1779766705747c&m=fe8e1570706d037873&ls=fdeb15747d600d7e72137874&l=ff2b13787561&s=fe1d16797c620478731c75&jb=ff981576&ju=fe5c117975650c7e751d&r=0

Wisconsin Education Association Finances (Mike Antonucci, EIA)

The Wisconsin Education Association Council’s membership numbers after Act 10 speak for themselves, however, the union was able to stay in front of the financial consequences with immediate and deep layoffs.

Total membership – 65,743, down 16,084

Total revenue – $18.8 million (90% came from member dues), down $2.8 million

CIA Bugging out of Yemen The closure of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen has forced the CIA to significantly scale back its counterterrorism presence in the country, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said the evacuation represents a major setback in operations against al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate.

The spy agency has pulled dozens of operatives, analysts and other staff members from Yemen as part of a broader extraction of roughly 200 Americans who had been based at the embassy in Sanaa, officials said. Among those removed were senior officers who had worked closely with Yemen’s intelligence and security services to target al-Qaeda operatives and disrupt terrorism plots that have often been aimed at the United States.

Wee Will Kill on Orders of Our Fantasy Controller A gunman fired shots on Saturday into a Copenhagen cafe that was hosting a public event on freedom of speech, featuring a Swedish artist who had received death threats for a 2007 cartoon he drew caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad.

One man, age 40, was killed and three police officers were wounded, the Danish police said, adding that the gunman had been unable to enter the Krudttoenden cafe.

Equal Opportunity Molestation: The Imam When the imam, Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, came into the office where she worked, she said, he would sometimes touch her cheek or put an arm around her shoulder. Mr. Saleem was revered in her close-knit community, and she did not object at first. But simply being alone together represented a forbidden intimacy, and looking back, she said those first gestures should have been more alarming.

“It’s not something that gets done,” the 23-year-old woman said recently. “Men and women don’t even shake hands.”

Fanatic who has a bank, a state, and a funny hat, wants more people to send money Less than a month after sparking controversy for saying Catholics don’t have to multiply “like rabbits,” Pope Francis has once again praised big families, telling a gathering in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday that having more children is not “an irresponsible choice.”

He also said that opting not to have children at all is “a selfish choice.”

A society that “views children above all as a worry, a burden, a risk, is a depressed society,” Francis said.

Citing European countries where the fertility rate is especially low, the pope said, “They are depressed societies because they don’t want children. They don’t have children. The birth rate doesn’t even reach 1%.”

Counterfeit Child Little Leaguers? Little League Baseball has stripped the U.S. championship from Chicago-based Jackie Robinson West and suspended its coach for violating a rule prohibiting the use of players who live outside the geographic area that the team represents, it was announced Wednesday.

Jackie Robinson West must vacate wins from the 2014 Little League Baseball International Tournament — including its Great Lakes Regional and United States championships.

The team’s manager, Darold Butler, has been suspended from Little League activity, and Illinois District 4 administrator Michael Kelly has been removed from his position.

Anne Moody, whose memoir “Coming of Age in Mississippi” gave a wrenching account of growing up poor in the segregated South and facing violence as a civil rights activist, died Thursday at her home in the small town Gloster, Mississippi. She was 74.

Moody had dementia the past several years and stopped eating two days before she died in her sleep, her sister, Adline Moody, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

On May 28, 1963, Anne Moody was among the students from historically black Tougaloo College who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. A white mob attacked the integrated group of peaceful students, dousing them with ketchup, mustard and sugar and beating one of the men.

A photograph from the sit-in shows Moody sitting stoically at the five-and-dime counter with food on her head. Moody’s eyes are downcast as a man pours more food on one of her fellow students, Joan Trumpauer.

Moody wrote in her 1968 memoir that “all hell broke loose” after she and two other black students, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis, prayed at the lunch counter.

“A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face,” Moody wrote. “Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.”

The Jackson sit-in occurred more than three years after a more famous one in Greensboro, North Carolina. The one in Jackson happened just after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that legalized sit-ins. But, Jackson police provided little protection to the protesters as about 300 whites screamed at and jostled them. www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2015/02/anne_moody_mississippi_civil_r.html

Charles Cobb, author of “This Non-Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed,” on the Panthers’ era: In the late 1960s and into the 70s, the Black Panther Party and a handful of small black organizations not withstanding, national black leadership mainly appealed for money from white people holding various positions of power and organized loud “black” conferences and caucuses that seemed more boast than commitment.

Charles Cobb Interviewed re: “This Non-Violent Stuff will Get You Killed” (video too) CONWAY: You know, when we last talked, we were talking about the NAACP kind of, like, supporting your organizing efforts and so on, and you had mentioned Robert Williams. And so you told me a little bit about Robert Williams. And I’m wondering. You said, this book here is how guns made the civil rights movement pop possible. But as I was reading, I see that you also says that the story is much more than guns; it’s about community organizing. What did you mean?

COBB: I mean just that. Guns, firstly, to give you the shortest answer, guns kept us alive, which meant that guns helped enable us to organize at the grassroots in local communities across the Black Belt itself. I think the missed point, the missed lesson of Southern movement is that more than a movement of mass protest and public spaces led by charismatic leaders, what really defines the movement in the South, certainly in the 1960s–and, I would argue, going all the way back to the days of slavery and slave revolts–is grassroots organizing in rural communities. If you think about it, slaves were not organizing protest marches on the auction blocks. Slaves were not having sit-ins at the plantation manor dining room table seeking a seat at the table. What were they doing? They were organizing something: a revolt, the ways and means of escape, the ways and means of survival, sabotage, assassination. The organizing tradition is a deep tradition in the black community. therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13132

Teachable Moment Coming on February 21: 167 Years Since Communist Manifesto Out

Over 100 School Workers Pepper Sprayed + Arrested for protesting for secular education

More than 100 people were detained Dec. 20 following a police crackdown on a demonstration in central Ankara organized by a teachers’ union. The demonstrators gathered in the morning in the Turkish capitol’s Tandoğan Square upon a call from teachers’ union Eğitim-İş to demand “Respect to Secular Education and Labor.”

Police used pepper spray, water cannons and tear gas to disperse the teachers when a group reportedly insisted on marching towards Kızılay.

Some fear that this could be threatened by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who founded the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party. He has recently made statements on education, which some have interpreted as a signal that he is planning to bring more religion into the classrooms.

Last year, Turkey’s parliament lifted a long-standing ban on Islamic headscarves in the civil service and this past September, it removed a ban on female students wearing them in high schools.

Steelworkers Strike Spreads (how will USW contain it?) U.S. oil workers at two BP Plc plants in the Midwest are joining the biggest strike at refineries across the nation since 1980 as negotiations on a new labor contract were suspended until next week.

Workers at BP’s Whiting refinery in Indiana and the Toledo plant in Ohio that it co-owns with Husky Energy Inc. notified management that they’ll be joining the strike at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, Scott Dean a spokesman for BP, said by e-mail Friday. The United Steelworkers, which represents 30,000 U.S. oil workers, has suspended negotiations with Royal Dutch Shell Plc, bargaining on behalf of employers, until next week.

The nine U.S. plants on strike and the two refineries headed for a walkout together total about 13 percent of the country’s refining capacity. It’s the first national strike by U.S. oil workers since 1980, when a work stoppage lasted three months. A full strike of USW members, employed at more than 200 U.S. refineries, fuel terminals, pipelines and chemical plants, would threaten to disrupt 64 percent of U.S. fuel output. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-07/u-s-oil-workers-strike-expands-to-bp-plants-with-talks-on-hold

Teachable Moment and More BS About Vietnam as the Anniversary approaches: Rory Kennedy (yes, those Kennedy’s) on the last days of Vietnam (nice footage, wrong outlook)

Shirley Willihnganz, the University of Louisville provost who hired “notorious ed school dean” Robert Felner has stepped down from her $342,694 a year position and will return to the faculty after a sabbatical.

Willihnganz told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the “Felner episode” was the biggest regret of her 13 years as a top administrator at U of L.

Willihnganz hired Felner as dean of the U of L College of Education and Human Development in 2003. Felner’s deanship has been described by some as a “reign of terror” because of his abusive treatment of staff, faculty, students and alumni.

Despite dozens of grievances filed against Felner and a faculty vote of no-confidence, Willihnganz and her boss, university president James Ramsey, were dismissive of complaints and vigorously defended him. Ultimately, Willihnganz was “forced to apologize” to the faculty, saying “mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that.”

In addition to his well documented abusive behavior, Felner was also engaged in criminal activity while working for the U of L and under Willihnganz’s supervision.

In 2010, Felner was sentenced 63 months in federal prison for a scheme that bilked $2.3 million of US Department of Education money from U of L and the University of Rhode Island. nblo.gs/13b5Kg

Former Principal in Drug/Gun Bust Still Working in San Diego Schools A San Diego Unified principal who was arrested in 2013 for possession of a stolen, loaded gun; hydrocodone; meth; marijuana and an open bottle of vodka in her car is still working for the school district.

Rachel Escobedo, 47, was placed on paid administrative leave at the time of her 2013 arrest, but NBC 7 Investigates has learned she’s since gone back to work as a central office resource teacher.http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Rachel-Escobedo-Principal-In-Drug-Gun-Case-Still-Working-At-SD-Unified–290997691.html

The San Ysidro School District is suing former Superintendent Manuel Paul to recover more than $200,000 in severance pay he received before pleading guilty to state and federal corruption charges.The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court, seeks the return of $211,347.42 paid to Paul in 2013 when he stepped down from the schools chief position amid allegations of corruption.

Paul is serving a two-month sentence at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego for the federal crime.

Citing the advice of counsel, a majority of trustees voted in June 2013 to release Paul from his contract rather than fire him. At the time, he was indicted on a state corruption charge in connection with the “pay-to-play” scandal that swept through three South County school districts. He pleaded guilty to filing a false document in that case.

But Paul was also the subject of a federal investigation. He eventually was charged with deprivation of benefit for political contribution for taking $2,500 cash in 2010 from a contractor who wanted to do business with the district.

Paul pleaded guilty to the federal charge Aug. 20. He was sentenced to two months in prison and fined $5,000.

The prison sentence, handed down Jan. 13 by Magistrate Judge William V. Gallo, took Paul by surprise. The plea bargain did not include time in custody. Gallo went for prison time, saying it was warranted because of Paul’s “shameful” conduct and the abuse of trust — something the judge called “a mortal sin.”

“I was an American Sniper, not like Kyle” The movie tells the story of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, said to have 160 confirmed kills, which would make him the most lethal American military member in history. He first shared his story in a memoir, which became the basis for Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation. Kyle views the occupation of Iraq as necessary to stop terrorists from coming to the mainland and attacking the U.S.; he sees the Iraqis as “savages” and attacks any critical thought about the overall mission and the military’s ability to accomplish it.

This portrayal is not unrealistic. My unit had plenty of soldiers who thought like that. When you are sacrificing so much, it’s tempting to believe so strongly in the “noble cause,” a belief that gets hardened by the fatigue of multiple tours and whatever is going on at home. But viewing the war only through his eyes gives us too narrow a frame.

During my combat tour I never saw the Iraqis as “savages.” They were a friendly culture who believed in hospitality, and were sometimes positive to a fault. The people are proud of their history, education system and national identity. I have listened to children share old-soul wisdom, and I have watched adults laugh and play with the naiveté of schoolboys. I met some incredible Iraqis during and after my deployment, and it is shameful to know that the movie has furthered ignorance that might put them in danger.

Unlike Chris Kyle, who claimed his PTSD came from the inability to save more service members, most of the damage to my mental health was what I call “moral injury,” which is becoming a popular term in many veteran circles.

As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death. My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good. Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.

I served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. During that time, we started to realize there were no weapons of mass destruction, the 9/11 commission report determined that Iraq was not involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, false sovereignty was given to Iraq by Paul Bremer, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were exposed, and the Battle of Fallujah was waged.

The destruction I took part in suddenly intersected with news that our reasons for waging war were untrue. The despicable conduct of those at Abu Ghraib was made more unforgivable by the honorable interactions I had with Iraqi civilians, and, together, it fueled the post-traumatic stress I struggle with today .http://www.salon.com/2015/02/01/i_was_an_american_sniper_and_chris_kyle%E2%80%99s_war_was_not_my_war/

Ray McGovern to War Criminal and Skank Herder Petraeus Speaking of Rumsfeld, you and I know him as your partner in some very serious crimes, relating to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the horrific violence that followed as well as the slaughter of so many innocent people in Afghanistan. For over a decade, I have closely observed your behavior and consider it nothing short of a media miracle that most Americans believe your worst sin to be that of adultery.

Since denial can be a very strong motivation, let me refresh your memory and remind you of the bad companions you fell in with. I am reminded of the egregious ways in which you did Rumsfeld’s bidding – winning promotions and richly undeserved fame by condoning the unspeakable – torture, for example.

Your third star came when you were dispatched to Iraq in June 2004, committed to carrying out Rumsfeld’s instructions to encourage Shia-on-Sunni torture and other human rights crimes. The all-too-predictable chickens are now coming home to roost from that unconscionably stupid attempt to defeat Sunni opponents of the U.S. occupation through such ignoble means – those chickens being what we now call ISIL or ISIS or simply the Islamic State.

What amazes me is that the Teflon is still clinging to you and Rumsfeld, given the bedlam in that entire area today. You’re not even held to account for the performance of the tens of thousands of the Iraqi troops that you crowed about having trained and equipped so well. They dropped their weapons and ran away early last year when the ragtag militants of ISIL attacked.

Back in April 2004 when the graphic photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were revealed, Rumsfeld claimed he was shocked, even though the International Red Cross had been complaining about abuses there for more than a year before the revelations.

The Senate Armed Services Committee eventually concluded without dissent, in a major investigative report on Dec. 11, 2008, that Rumsfeld bore direct responsibility for the abuses committed by interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other military prisons.

The Committee added that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials, who “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

Four years before the Senate report, in May 2004, Gen. Antonio Taguba came close to revealing precisely that, when he led the Pentagon’s first (and only honest) investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld promptly fired him. Yet, throughout all this scandal and mayhem, you were maneuvering your way up the high-command ladder without any indication that you were objecting to any of this. consortiumnews.com/2015/02/03/a-pointed-letter-to-gen-petraeus/

Petreaus, Jill Kelly, and the Degenerate Top Brass Judging from her e-mails, Jill Kelley was star-struck by the big-name military commanders rotating between the war zones in the Middle East and her home town of Tampa. And they were equally smitten with her.

“Everyone thinks you’re a RockStar!” Kelley gushed in a 2012 e-mail to Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, then commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East. “We agreed how amazing it must be that you’re single-handedly re-writing history,” she added, recalling how she had sung the general’s praises to several foreign ambassadors at the Republican National Convention that August in Tampa.

After another social event, she wrote a similar mash note to Mattis’s deputy, Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward. “What a Leader you were to these heads of State,” she enthused. “You ROCK!!!”

In late 2012, Kelley’s talent as a Tampa hostess and her knack for charming men in uniform indirectly triggered one of the most embarrassing national security scandals of the past decade. Among other casualties, the fallout led to the forced resignation of CIA Director David H. Petraeus — a former four-star Army general — and the early retirement of Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Kelley’s chumminess with Petraeus and the military brass had attracted the notice of the spymaster’s biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell. She bad-mouthed Kelley in anonymous e-mails to military officials and others, according to federal investigators and a lawsuit filed by Kelley. The FBI got involved. Petraeus quit in disgrace. Allen retired.

AfricaCom: Two, Three, (yes, Four) Many Wars to Lose Still US Africa Command (AFRICOM) head General David Rodriguez called for a large-scale US-led “counterinsurgency” campaign against groups in West Africa during remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC last week.

Rodriguez’s statements are part of a coordinated campaign by the US to massively expand its military operations in the resource-rich region, as it combats the influence of China and other powers.

The US should prepare for operations in at least four West African countries as part of a “huge international and multinational” response aimed at forces affiliated with Boko Haram, Rodriguez said.

AFRICOM is already preparing an “across the board response to the threat,” Rodriguez said.

Snitch Fat Leonard on How He Corrupted the Navy Brass “Fat” Leonard Francis, the contractor at the center of the ever-widening Navy bribery scandal, appears to be cooperating with federal investigators and was key in securing criminal charges against yet another official who was arrested Tuesday.

Paul Simpkins, 60, a former Department of Defense official who once oversaw Navy contracts in Southeast Asia, was arrested in Haymarket, Va., and pleaded not guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit bribery in federal court later in the afternoon.

Simpkins is the highest-ranking civilian to be implicated in the kickback scheme involving cash, prostitutes and high-class travel, believed to be one of the biggest in Navy history.

The complaint, filed Monday in San Diego federal court, says authorities received information implicating Simpkins from a “confidential witness” who has pleaded guilty in the case and is cooperating in an apparent attempt to get a reduced sentence. While the witness is unnamed, a footnote says his only criminal history is a firearms-related conviction about 30 years ago in a foreign country.

That description matches Francis, who pleaded guilty last month and was convicted in Malaysia about 30 years ago of possessing two guns and ammunition without a license.

The witnesses’ accounts were backed up with documentation, Cordell DeLaPena, a special agent with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, wrote in court documents.

Simpkins held a supervisory role over Navy contracts from 2005 to 2007 and lived in Singapore. The city is also where Francis ran his Glenn Defense Marine Asia company, which provides services such as food, fuel and waste removal to visiting Navy ships around Southeast Asia.

According to the complaint, Simpkins met with Francis in 2006 and offered to use his influence to steer Navy contracts toward Francis’ company in exchange for money. A deal was hammered out in several meetings at a Singapore hotel bar, the complaint states.

Guilty pleas since the scheme first became public in 2013

• Leonard Glenn Francis, the Singapore-based contractor at the center of the scheme, pleaded guilty to bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to defraud the United States. His company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, which has contracted with Navy vessels for 25 years, pleaded guilty to the same charges. Francis remains in federal custody without bond.

• John Beliveau II, a supervisory special agent at the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service, admitted to giving Francis secret information about the military’s investigation into the bribes.

• Alex Wisidagama, Francis’ cousin and an executive in his company, admitted his role in overbilling the Navy some $20 million for services.

• Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dan Layug, who worked as a logistics specialist at a U.S. base in Yokosuka, Japan, admitted to passing on information to Francis.

• Edmond Aruffo, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who then went to work for Francis, admitted to conspiring with others in 2009 and 2010 to defraud the Navy by agreeing to submit inflated invoices.

All are awaiting sentencing.

That Big Secret About the Saudi Connection to 9/11/2001

A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism.

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

A top Army official confirmed to Congress on Tuesday that hundreds of wounded warriors at three Texas treatment centers had been harassed and abused by staff who considered them “slackers.” Col. Chris Toner, head of the Army Transition Command, acknowledged that there had been a pattern of “disrespect, harassment and belittlement of soldiers” at Warrior Transition Units (WTUs) at Fort Bliss, Fort Hood and the Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas from 2009-2013.

Toner singled out abuses at the WTU at Fort Bliss during a hearing before the House Armed Services’ subcommittee on military personnel.

“There were challenges at Fort Bliss without a shadow of a doubt,” Toner said.

The abuses were limited to the 2009-20013 time frame, Toner said, and he was now “confident that we have the programs going in the right direction” at Hood, Bliss and Brooke.

The mistreatment of wounded warriors at Texas bases was first reported in a joint investigation by NBC 5 and the Dallas Morning News relying on Freedom of Information Act documents detailing the official complaints of soldiers and others involved in the WTU programs.

The documents quoted Dr. Stephen Saul, a psychiatrist hired to train staff at Fort Hood’s WTU, as saying that many leaders at Fort Hood lacked an understanding of mental health issues and refused to believe that post-traumatic stress disorder was real.

Those suffering from PTSD were told to “man-up and move on,” Stahl said. “The idea is that you’re weak, you’re cowardly, you’re worthless, you’re not strong and it’s your fault.”

The Monarch of Jordan, CIA torture center described in Guantanamo Diary

Obamagogue to Send $1 Billion to Jordanian Torturers to fight the other barbarians Fresh off the death of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasaesbeh, the State Department has announced that they are planning to almost triple foreign aid to Jordan in response, tacking on another $1 billion per year.

The US had been sending Jordan $660 million per year, and the State Department says the “unprecedented strains” caused by the war with ISIS necessitates the increase.

National Security Doc Shows US Drive For World Rule The document’s introduction lists eight “top strategic risks to our interests.” Four of them are traditional security issues—attacks on the US homeland, on US citizens or allies, weapons of mass destruction, and the collapse of failing states—but defined so generally that they could apply to any country in the world.

The other four strategic risks are worth quoting: “global economic crisis or widespread economic slowdown”; “severe global infectious disease outbreaks”; “climate change”; and “major energy market disruptions.” This has considerable significance: the US government now regards virtually any form of economic, social or environmental disruption as a strategic security issue potentially justifying American military intervention.

The introduction also includes a call for Congress to end limits on military spending that have been part of “sequestration,” a shift that has also been included in Obama’s recently proposed budget.

The introduction concludes by stating the principal shift in the orientation of US foreign policy from Bush to Obama (without referring to the previous administration):

“This strategy eschews orienting our entire foreign policy around a single threat or region. It establishes instead a diversified and balanced set of priorities appropriate for the world’s leading global power with interests in every part of an increasingly interconnected world.”

Detroit: The Great Divide: Rich and Poor/White and Black There, in the middle of the road, at the very point where Detroit morphs into Grosse Pointe Park, was a large, opulently decorated Christmas tree. Next to it, a collection of just over half a dozen smaller trees stood, taking up the rest of the width of the street.

The street had been sectioned off. They could not drive through. “We’d heard about it on the news, but it’s something else to see it in real life,” Rice said with some bewilderment. “To me it says: “Detroiters stay out! Don’t come in. You are not welcome here,” Williams said.

The couple may not have been crossing international boundaries, but they did try to cross the increasingly visible line dividing Detroit and its collection of suburbs – one of the most shocking in America.

Billionaires’ Football Chargers Seek to Loot America’s Finest City The U-T editorialized today (January 31) that the task force on the Chargers stadium is “packed with the right mix of expertise.” Of course it is “packed” — just as all the other task forces and special committees are “packed” with corporate-welfare boosters. The task force’s job is to shift as much of the burden as possible on to taxpayers and steer the profits to the private sector — socialization of the risk and privatization of the gain.

This time, though, the task force is looking at problems that appear insuperable. For example, San Diego is not only a small market (17th largest in the nation), it is a financially squeezed one.

In recent years, the National Football League’s attendance focus has been on the affluent. Teams want to make their money on luxury suites and seats and personal seat licenses. The last time I checked, the Chargers had ditched the idea of personal seat licenses. There isn’t the wealth in this market. Also, the team will not make the kind of money other teams do on luxury suites and seats. How many biotech executives will fete their friends in a Chargers box? www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/jan/31/ticker-chargers-stadium-task-force-packed/

Detroit On Fire. 220 Buildings burn in January as Recolonization speeds along In Detroit, fires are a serious menace, burning neighborhood cores and chasing out longtime residents. The city’s disastrous budget decisions over the past three decades have left the fire department with a skeleton crew of firefighters and a frail fleet of routinely malfunctioning rigs.

This year we are tracking every structure fire in Detroit – more than 3,000, if the past few years are any indication. The project, Detroit on Fire, will provide an unflinching look at a crisis that has been largely ignored by the media and neglected by politicians.

In January, fires broke out in 205 houses, 10 commercial buildings, seven apartments, two churches and a school. Two people were killed and several more injured, including two firefighters.

A. Without an ideology, you lack the glue that the Confucian empire had, you lack the glue that the Maoist period had. And so you have nothing in common between party and people, between state and country. And that’s a very difficult thing to proceed with in China when you have a Leninist party that by its very definition, when it was first formed in the late 19th century, relies upon ideology to convince people that we understand the history, we understand the present and we know where to go in the future.

That’s a very powerful doctrine, if you believe in it. Without any such doctrine, he has coursed to this very negative policy of trying to keep-out-the-enemy doctrine. It’s much better if you’re closed in the armor of your own doctrine than if you just have the old apparatus of the Great Firewall in order to keep out the enemy doctrine.

Q. Does China rely more on nationalism then? Doesn’t that risk fascism?

A. I’m not sure about fascism. But I am sure that nationalism is one of the reasons why the foreign policy of Xi Jinping has been somewhat provocative perhaps in the East China Sea, South China Sea, vis-à-vis America, as a device to get people behind him in his campaigns, particularly the corruption campaign. But I think that in the long run that’s a very dangerous path to pursue because as Chinese governments in the past have found, if you unleash nationalism and then you are unwilling or unable to follow through with the right actions, then the people get fed up with you, they think that you are being unpatriotic yourself, that the government is failing. And so nationalism is a very dangerous thing to unleash. I don’t think it is fascism so much. I just think it is just a weapon for Xi Jinping.

Q. If you don’t have Confucianism or Marxism, and you aren’t focusing on nationalism, what do you have?

Barbarism Rising: CIA Prison/Torture Site Executes 2 for One burned, crowds go wild on all sides Jordan executed two prisoners early Wednesday morning to avenge the burning alive of a Jordanian fighter pilot in a move that seemed likely to thrust the usually peaceful country into the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State.

Jordanian state television said one of the executed prisoners was Sajida al Rishawi, the 44-year-old Iraqi woman whose release the Islamic State had demanded in return for the life of a Japanese hostage killed last week. The other was Ziad al-Karbouli, a jihadist who once worked with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian who founded al Qaida in Iraq, the organization that was the precursor to the Islamic State.

Government spokesman Mohammed al Momani announced in Amman that the two prisoners had been executed at dawn. Both Karbouli and Rishawi had been in prison for nearly a decade.

Gibson is an officer in the Buffalo Teachers Federation. Not clear why he didn’t resist the copper.

War Criminal Redux: Kissinger and the Argentine Dirty War Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter’s Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-fascist military junta the “green light” for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.

In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as “terrorists”) www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/new-memo-kissinger-gave-green-light-argentina-dirty-war

NEA’s Boss, Eskelsen, Has that Special Glow of Self After Reading American Enterprise Institute “Book” : Finally someone (besides me) is talking about the power and authority of teachers! As educators, we have to reject the suggestion that ‘You can’t do that.’ Push back, come up with your own ideas, and 96.4 percent of the time, you’ll find that you can do important things to improve schools. Such are the cage-busters. hepg.org/hep-home/books/the-cage-busting-teacher

Spy versus Spy

So Long, One-eyed CIA WatchDog All of those interviewed anonymously by McClatchy for this story, who included former colleagues, asked not to be identified because their perspective conflicts with the official portrayal of Buckley’s tenure promoted publicly by the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Their contention is that the former House Intelligence Committee staffer raised expectations that he would be an aggressive and independent watchdog but failed to deliver at a time of crisis.

After Buckley’s inquiry found that CIA employees had improperly monitored the committee’s work on its torture inquiry, a panel set up by the agency attacked his conclusions as inaccurate and recommended that no one be punished.

Buckley, meanwhile, began responding to queries from a potential employer as early as June, even though the Senate monitoring investigation wasn’t finalized until July.

Opening Prayer Rant at Tennessee Senate I pray for the people of Tennessee who have been so downtrodden by the wicked courts from on high that they have been subject to tyrannical judiciary. And I pray that you would save Tennessee from the edicts of Washington DC that would go against the plain wishes of the people of Tennessee, particularly pertaining to the 9th and 10th Amendment.

I pray that you would sanctify this state, that it would be holy and would be a leader among the other states. That they would see that there is a God that lives, that you love the people of Tennessee. That you gave your life that we might be saved from our sins. I pray that you would forgive the many sins of carelessness or lethargy or desperation. The compromises.

Oh lord save Tennessee for Jesus sake, and I pray that your will would be done that you would be our coverage, that we would not be forced into these edicts from Washington DC or any other quarter, but let the people know that our coverage is the same as with Moses and the children of Israel when they went through the wilderness with only the divine providence of almighty God.

American Sniper: What can be learned and taught? The Kyle played by Bradley Cooper is similar to the one that comes through in his memoir. Cooper refers to Iraqis as “savages” throughout; Kyle sees the entire population of Iraq as the enemy.

It’s a worldview that’s ingrained in Kyle from a young age. In the early scenes of the film, Kyle’s father is lecturing Chris and his younger brother — who has just been beaten up on the playground — at the dinner table. The father’s comments, which could just as easily have been uttered by any of Kyle’s drill sergeants, are worth quoting at length. They are a window not just into Kyle, but the pathological mentality, that is partially responsible for keeping the US at war for a decade and a half with an all-volunteer military:

There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to think that evil doesn’t exist in the world. If there were ever dark on their doorsteps, they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep.

Then you have predators who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re wolves. Then there are those who are blessed with the gift of aggression with an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheep dog.

We are not raising any sheep in this family. [The father takes off his belt, throws it on the table, and moves toward Chris and his brother]. I will whoop your ass if you turn into a wolf.

All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE) strongly condemns the vicious attack by the police on students of School of Open Learning (SOL), Delhi University peacefully demonstrating outside Shastri Bhawan for their legitimate demands. The demonstration was occasioned by stubborn attitude of Union Minister of Human Resource Development who has not responded to an earlier memorandum by the students. The matter was urgent as classes had not been held, courses had either not started or been left mid-way. With exams round the corner the students were left with no option but to demonstrate peacefully to get a speedy response.

Prof. Madhu Prasad, Member Presidium and Spokesperson of AIFRTE, gave the following account of the situation:

“I was personally present right throughout the demonstration (which started at 12 noon on 30th January 2015) and was witness to the fact that it was completely peaceful. The students were gathered at the gate and were not disturbing traffic in the area either. Suddenly a police bus turned into the entrance and trapped the students between the closed gate and the bus. Then the police attacked the students and I saw several male police dragging the girls. I immediately intervened verbally and physically to prevent them from touching the girls until policewomen finally turned up. Even then I tried to prevent them from pulling the girls into the bus as they had not done any wrong and were merely demanding their rights as students to meet and submit their memorandum to the HRD Minister. But there was no attempt on the part of the police to be at all reasonable. They abused and roughed up the students and further confiscated the speaker being used by the students. When Alok (a student activist) and I objected to this, they spoke extremely rudely to us too, saying that if we were teachers then why we were instigating the students. Then they dragged Alok into the bus also.”

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Japan’s Leaders Still denying Fascist History as nation re-militarizesPrime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on Thursday criticized an American textbook that he said inaccurately depicted Japan’s actions during World War II, opening a new front in a battle to sway American views of the country’s wartime history.

Speaking in Parliament, Mr. Abe pledged to increase efforts to fight what he called mistaken views abroad concerning Japan’s wartime actions, when the Japanese military conquered much of Asia. He singled out a high school history textbook published by McGraw-Hill Education that he said contained the sort of negative portrayals that Japan must do more to combat.

Fake Colleges (which ones aren’t?) From her hometown in India in 2010, Bhanu Challa said she had no reason to doubt that Tri-Valley University was a legitimate American school where she could pursue a master’s degree. Its website featured smiling students in caps and gowns and promised a leafy campus in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb.

Months later, her hands were in cuffs as federal investigators questioned her motives for being in the U.S. Authorities told her that Tri-Valley was a sham school. It was selling documents that allowed foreigners to obtain U.S. student visas, and in some cases work in the country, while providing almost no instruction, according to federal investigators.

“I was blank, totally blank …,” she said, recalling her shock. “I didn’t know what to do, who I could approach.”

Tx Mom Complains. Commie Book Under Review A Texas mother recently voiced opposition to a book about poverty she described as “Marxist,” prompting a committee in Highland Park to review whether the book is appropriate for students.

The book, written by journalist David Shipler about Americans living near the poverty line, is taught in Highland Park Advanced Placement English classes.

“I realized there is a real agenda here because [the school] explained to me English III is teaching social issues,” she said, according to Raw Story. “How is that going to help my child read better and write better?”http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/texas-school-poverty-book-marxist

Letter to the Teacher Who Changed My Life Neal Tonken taught me English in 10th grade. He changed my life. He died last week. I don’t remember what he taught me about how to start an essay, but that’s the way he would have started it.

He was clear and direct in his writing. Our first day of class in 1984 was his first day too. He’d been a lawyer and chucked it all to teach. He brought a bag of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jelly. He asked us to describe how to make a sandwich. Then he read our instructions out loud, following along literally, placing the jar on top of the bag of bread. We’d forgotten basic elements like removing the bread from the bag or taking the lids off the jars.

Those CSU Student “Success” Fees (tax) Student graduation rates, state budget issues and other topics will be discussed Tuesday in Cal State University Chancellor Timothy P. White’s State of the CSU speech.

White will deliver the address ahead of the 23-campus system’s Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday and Wednesday, during which weighty topics such as guidelines for the controversial student success fees will be discussed and voted on.

The fees, which are in place on 12 CSU campuses, range as high as $780 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to $35 at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson. While CSU administrators say the fees are needed to fund the hiring of professors and advisers, as well as to increase services, students have said they have been used to skirt a CSU tuition freeze at $5,472 set in 2012.

Lawmakers last summer placed a moratorium on any new fees until 2016, after new guidelines are established.

US Military to Afghan War Stats: Shut up! In late December, as they do every few months, American military officials in Kabul sent a trove of data to the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction for its quarterly report. Over the years, such figures have told an often dispiriting story about Washington’s enormous investment in the country’s security forces, laying out their size, readiness, attrition level and the state of their infrastructure.

Five days later, military officials followed up with an unusual request. Commanders in Afghanistan informed the inspector general’s office that they had decided to classify the bulk of that data. The decision came after the military, late last year, classified a periodic report that the inspector general has used over the years as the primary source to assess the state of Afghan forces. The stated reason? It could give the enemy the upper hand.

“With lives literally on the line, I am sure that you can join me in recognizing that we must be careful to avoid providing sensitive information to those that threaten our forces and Afghan forces, particularly information that can be used by such opposing forces to sharpen their attacks,” Gen. John Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, wrote to the inspector general, John Sopko, on Jan. 18.

War Forever As the Empire’s Have no answer to IS’ Grand Strategy: the Caliphate–as nobody can say: Gods don’t make people. People Make Gods. IS Hits Kirkuk Exploiting a foggy night as cover, Islamic State militants launched a surprise attack on Iraqi Kurdish positions on the outskirts of Kirkuk early Friday, killing a senior Kurdish commander and at least five of his men, security officials in the city said.

The assault was one of the most aggressive undertaken against Kirkuk in months by the Islamic State, the jihadist group that straddles a large stretch of Iraq and Syria. The city, in northern Iraq, is an oil hub that is seen as central to the aspiration of Iraqi Kurdish leaders and that poses an attractive strategic target for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Families fled their homes as the fighting intensified, and at one point, the militants stormed an abandoned hotel in the Kirkuk city center.

The deadly foray on Friday demonstrated the continued ability of Islamic State fighters to harass Iraq’s cities, despite a punishing monthslong campaign by Iraqi forces backed by United States airstrikes to dislodge the extremists.

Afghans Vote with their Feet for Taliban’s Justice system Frustrated by Western-inspired legal codes and a government court system widely seen as corrupt, many Afghans think that the militants’ quick and tradition-rooted rulings are their best hope for justice. In the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Chaman, havens for exiled Taliban figures, local residents describe long lines of Afghans waiting to see judges.

“You won’t find the same number of people in the Afghan courts as you do in the Taliban courts,” said Hajji Khudai Noor, a Kandahar resident who recently settled a land dispute through the Taliban in Quetta. “There are hundreds of people waiting for justice there.”

Western officials have long considered a fair and respected justice system to be central to quelling the insurgency, in an acknowledgment that the Taliban’s appeal had long been rooted in its use of traditional rural justice codes. But after the official end of the international military mission and more than a billion dollars in development aid to build up Afghanistan’s court system, it stands largely discredited and ridiculed by everyday Afghans. A common refrain, even in Kabul, is that to settle a dispute over your farm in court, you must first sell your chickens, your cows and your wife.

Countless training programs funded by Western allies for lawyers and judges have become bywords for waste. Laws suited to Western-style democracies have populated the books.

US’ Puppet Shiites Still Slaughtering Sunnis for….? At least 72 people from a majority Sunni village in eastern Iraq were methodically singled out for slaughter this week, according to witnesses and local Sunni leaders, who said the victims were killed by Shiite militiamen who were supporting Iraqi security forces.

A spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister said Thursday that the government was investigating the claims. Some local security officials in Diyala Province have asserted the victims were militants killed in battle by the security forces, denying that sectarian executions had occurred.

But witness accounts suggest that is what happened in the village of Barwanah starting on Monday. Several survivors described seeing a column of troops drive into the village that afternoon, quickly followed by a convoy of militia fighters. The militiamen started calling out specific names of people they were seeking, then began killing.

The murders are a potentially explosive descent into the kind of sectarian violence that led many Iraqi Sunnis to lose all trust in their government and its militia allies, even before the jihadists of the Islamic State began their rapid advance through much of northern Iraq last summer.

In recent months, the new, Western-backed government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has urgently sought to regain the trust of Iraqi Sunnis, calling the effort an integral part of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

War criminal Kissinger warns of new cold war Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has given a chilling assessment of a new geopolitical situation taking shape amid the Ukrainian crisis, warning of a possible new Cold War and calling the West’s approach to the crisis a “fatal mistake.”

The 91-year-old diplomat characterized the tense relations as exhibiting the danger of “another Cold War.”

“This danger does exist and we can’t ignore it,” Kissinger said. He warned that ignoring this danger any further may result in a “tragedy,” he told Germany’s Der Spiegel. If the West wants to be “honest,” it should recognize, that it made a “mistake,” he said of the course of action the US and the EU adopted in the Ukrainian conflict. Europe and the US did not understand the “significance of events” that started with the Ukraine-EU economic negotiations that initially brought about the demonstrations in Kiev last year. Those tensions should have served as a starting point to include Russia in the discussion, he believes. rt.com/news/203795-kissinger-warns-cold-war/#.VMnavtNFlig.facebook

Chile Sentences Two For Murders During US’ Coup Two former Chilean intelligence officials have been sentenced in the murders of two American citizens shortly after the 1973 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Pedro Espinoza, a retired army intelligence officer, was sentenced to seven years in the killings of the Americans, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, while Rafael González, who worked for Chilean Air Force intelligence, was sentenced to two years of police supervision as an accomplice in the Horman murder. The 276-page ruling was issued on Jan. 9 but was not made public until Wednesday, after all parties had been notified. Two former Chilean intelligence officials have been sentenced in the murders of two American citizens shortly after the 1973 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Pedro Espinoza, a retired army intelligence officer, was sentenced to seven years in the killings of the Americans, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, while Rafael González, who worked for Chilean Air Force intelligence, was sentenced to two years of police supervision as an accomplice in the Horman murder. The 276-page ruling was issued on Jan. 9 but was not made public until Wednesday, after all parties had been notified.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/world/americas/2-sentenced-in-murders-in-chile-coup.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

Johnson, who heads the Institute of New Economic Thinking and was previously managing director at Soros, said societies can tolerate income inequality if the income floor is high enough. But with an existing system encouraging chief executives to take decisions solely on their profitability, even in the richest countries inequality is increasing.

Johnson added: “People need to know there are possibilities for their children – that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else. There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get more even money.”,,,But as former New Zealand prime minister and now UN development head Helen Clark explained, rather than being a game changer, recent examples suggest the Ferguson movement may soon be forgotten. “We saw Occupy flare up and then fade like many others like it,” Clark said. “The problem movements like these have is stickability. The challenge is for them to build structures that are ongoing; to sustain these new voices.” (reformers is morning glories—Plunkett) www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015?CMP=share_btn_fb

With 2/3rds of Detroit Public/Private Properties Vacant–thousands more foreclosed Wayne County officials have warned that 62,000 Detroit properties are subject to foreclosure this year because the owners had fallen three years behind on taxes. Even as Detroit has had a flood of foreclosures over the last six years, this year’s number is a record, accounting for nearly one-sixth of all city properties — an unimaginable total in most cities, tax foreclosure experts said. Some portion of the properties will be put up in the fall for public auction, where prices have sometimes started as low as $500.

“This is the worst year ever,” Ted Phillips, the executive director of the United Community Housing Coalition, which tries to help people avoid foreclosure, told the gathered crowd, gazing out at row after row after row.

Though these were technically “show cause” hearings, offering residents a chance to argue that the county should not foreclose on their homes, the scale made it feel more like an unhappy county fair — complete with workers in yellow vests offering help from an array of nonprofit groups and large signs guiding residents into subgroups like “Nondeed holders including renters” and “Homeowner occupants.” Thursday was the first day of what will be seven days of hearings at Cobo Center, which officials said they had chosen because the proceedings would have outgrown other sites. www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/us/a-hearing-on-detroit-housing-foreclosures-draws-a-reluctant-crowd.html

Those numbers are even more pronounced when set against the viral talking point of last week: Oxfam’s study on inequality, which said that those in the top 1 percent were set to control 50 percent of the world’s wealth by next year. That statistic has become a rallying cry for the average worker. (There’s a problem with the math that Oxfam used, which we’ll get to in a moment, but that doesn’t negate the overall message about income disparity.)

How Guantanamo Diary Got Past Obamagogue’s Censors Some of Slahi’s lawyers have security clearance, and could read the full manuscript, but they are barred from talking about what might be behind the redactions. “These were not conversations that I could have with them,” said Siems.

Siems was never in contact with Slahi as he prepared Guantánamo Diary. Journalists have not been allowed to speak directly to current detainees (although in the book, Slahi claims that his interrogators asked at one point if he would talk to “a moderate journalist from the Wall Street Journal” to “refute the wrong things we’re suspected of”). Military commissions trials at Guantanamo, though open to the media, must be watched from behind soundproof glass, with the audio on a 40-second time delay to allow censors to bleep out any classified information. In 2012, detainee lawyers, the ACLU, and a host of media organizations challenged that “presumptive classification,” but a judge ruled against them.

“That’s the absurdity of this classification regime,” said Shamsi. “There is so much public information about what happened to the prisoners at Guantanamo, yet the government goes out of its way to prevent us from hearing directly from them.”

For Larry Siems, censorship is at the core of Slahi’s story, and while the redactions sometimes impede his narrative, they serve a literary function as well.

Seattle Teacher Suing for Pepper Spray Police Attack A high school teacher and activist is suing the city of Seattle, claiming police officers unlawfully pepper sprayed him as he left a peaceful rally on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Married San Diego Coppers Sentenced in Drug Case Two married former San Diego police officers who broke into people’s homes while on duty and stole prescription painkillers to feed their drug addictions were each sentenced Friday to three years in state prison.Bryce Charpentier, 32, and Jennifer Charpentier, 42, pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit a burglary, conspiracy to commit a crime — possession and sale of a controlled substance — selling or furnishing a narcotic substance and possession of a firearm by an addict.The Charpentiers admitted sending text messages to each other in order to set up burglaries in which they stole prescription drugs from people with whom they had contact while on duty. The defendants also admitted stealing Hydrocodone and selling the drug, even taking one of their four children along on one of the deliveries, authorities said. www.kusi.com/story/27988767/married-sdpd-officers-sentenced-in-drug-sales-case

Dictator Mugabe To Run African Union African leaders meeting in Addis Ababa have chosen the continent’s oldest head of state, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, as AU chairman for the coming year.Mr Mugabe, who is 90, drew applause when he denounced colonialism.He also spoke of the “scourge of terrorism” from Boko Haram and said there needed to be “lasting solutions” to the issue in Nigeria and Cameroon.Earlier, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned of the dangers of leaders clinging to power.Mr Mugabe has led his country since independence in 1980.He is subject to travel bans imposed by the US and the EU because of political violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe. www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-31057151

Solidarity for Never

So Many Re-building the Second International–again–in new ways: GREECE “Left” aligns with Greek Rightists to form government The right-wing Independent Greeks party said on Monday it would back Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras to be the next prime minister, after he fell just short of a majority needed to govern following Sunday’s poll.

The surprise alliance between two staunchly anti-bailout parties, spooked markets and triggered a loss of nearly 4 per cent on the Athens Stock Exchange as well as elsewhere in Europe.

Mandelaites Release Prime Evil Eugene de Kock, the man known as “Prime Evil” for leading an apartheid death squad that killed and tortured scores of people, will be released from prison, South Africa’s justice minister said on Friday.

Michael Masutha said he took the decision to grant de Kock parole after consultation with the families of his victims. He said the former Vlakplaas commander was remorseful and had helped the Missing Persons Task Team to find the bodies of hit squad victims.

“In the interest of reconciliation and nation building, I have placed Mr de Kock on parole,” Mr Masutha said, adding that the date and nature of his release would be kept secret.

De Kock, 66, was sentenced in 1996 to two life sentences for six murders and an additional 212 years for charges ranging from attempted murder to kidnapping and fraud.

His testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the activities of his death squad shocked his fellow countrymen by its graphic nature.

The decision to release de Kock was met with mixed reaction in South Africa, which is still largely divided along racial and socio-economic lines 20 years after the end of apartheid, and where his name still embodies the visceral cruelty of the old system.

Jane Quin, the sister of Jacqui Quin, whose death in Lesotho in 1985 was ordered by de Kock, said it was a “complete travesty” and his debt to society was “not paid”.

Obamagogue Convicts CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage charges Monday, for telling a journalist for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has led an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the journalist, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.

The case revolved around a C.I.A. operation in which a former Russian scientist provided Iran with intentionally flawed nuclear component schematics. Mr. Risen revealed the operation in his 2006 book “State of War,” describing it as a mismanaged, potentially reckless mission that may have inadvertently aided the Iranian nuclear program.

Mr. Sterling faces years in prison.

Liberal advocacy groups have hailed Mr. Sterling as a whistle-blower for taking his concerns about the program to the Senate Intelligence Committee in early 2003, a time when dissenting voices in the C.I.A. were hushed as the country prepared for war in Iraq. The Justice Department and C.I.A., however, deny that characterization. They said the Iran operation was not mismanaged and said Mr. Sterling went to Congress and then the news media as a way to settle personal grievances.

Russian Spies Busted! In a case full of intrigue and clandestine communications, three Russians were charged on Monday with working secretly in New York as agents for Russian intelligence, the federal authorities said.

Two of the Russians posed as official representatives of Russia, attached to the Russian Federation of New York. The third man worked in the Manhattan office of a Russian bank and lived in the Bronx. All three men worked for a division of the S.V.R., the Russian foreign intelligence agency, known as Directorate ER, which focuses on economic issues.

The three Russians — as well as others, unnamed in the complaint, who were said to be working covertly in this country — had been directed to collect intelligence on potential United States sanctions against the Russian Federation and on efforts by the United States to develop alternative energy resources, the complaint said.

CIA Ran Torture Center on Britain’s Diego Garcia The UK government is facing renewed pressure to make a full disclosure of its involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 kidnap and torture programme after another leading Bush-era US official said suspects were held and interrogated on the British territory of Diego Garcia.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell at the US state department, said the Indian Ocean atoll was used by the CIA as “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time”.

In an interview with Vice News, Wilkerson said three US intelligence sources had informed him that the CIA used Diego Garcia for what he described as “nefarious activities”, with prisoners being held for weeks at a time. …

Diego Garcia’s population was removed during the late 1960s and early 70s and forced to settle on the Seychelles and Mauritius. Since then the atoll has been leased by the UK to the US for use as a military base.

Mystic With Funny Hat Makes Shrine to Patron Saint of Nazis a Basilica (St Theresa is indeed the patron saint of fascists—if you have a “Little Flower” in your Neighborhood) Pope Francis has bestowed the title of “basilica” upon the historic National Shrine of the Little Flower Catholic Church in Royal Oak, making it only the second church in Michigan and one of 82 in the U.S. to carry the honorary designation.

The honor means the landmark Oakland County church, its facade marked by a mammoth sandstone cross at the intersection of Woodward Ave. and 12 Mile, will get a reconfigured name and have greater significance as a Catholic pilgrimage site. The designation also connotes a heightened relationship with the pope, so the parish will celebrate anniversaries related to the role of the papacy.

Afzeli says the protest started peacefully, but says a group of armed infiltrators began blocking roads, throwing rocks and shooting at police officers on the scene. Police responded by calling in reinforcements and firing in the air to disperse the crowd, he said.

Michigan Lottery Where Winners are Losers Who Cannot Be Winners (and what about all that money for the schools?) The Michigan Lottery Bureau is cracking down on lottery retailers and their family members who frequently cash in big prizes on behalf of their customers.

Some lottery retailers buy discounted tickets from winners who don’t want to cash in their own for various reasons, said lottery spokesman Jeff Holyfield. The retailers or others working in the stores then pocket the difference between what they paid for the winning ticket, and what it’s actually worth. And the ticket buyers get cash — albeit less than the full amount — while flying under the radar of lottery and tax agencies, and others that may stake a claim to part or all of the prize. www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2015/01/29/lottery-probing-retailers-win-big/22565189/

So Long

Co-creator of the Pill Carl Djerassi, an eminent chemist who 63 years ago synthesized a hormone that changed the world by creating the key ingredient for the oral contraceptive known as “the pill,” died at his home in San Francisco on Friday. He was 91.

His son, Dale, said the cause was complications of liver and bone cancer.

Dr. Djerassi (pronounced jer-AH-see) arrived in America as World War II engulfed Europe, a 16-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who, with his mother, lost their last $20 to a swindling New York cabdriver. He wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship. It was a little help that made a big difference.

68 Arrested as Stanford Students and Profs Fight Back Monday afternoon, Stanford students and community members shut down the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in support of the Ferguson Action national demands, which include the demilitarization of local law enforcement and the repurposing of law enforcement funds to support community-based alternatives to incarceration.

According to Silicon Shut Down’s Twitter feed, 68 people were arrested in total. According to an email sent out to the Stanford community, 57 people were released and 11 have been sent to jail.

During the demonstration, participants engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and attempted to block the westbound side of the bridge for 28 minutes to symbolize the fact that every 28 hours, a black person is killed by a police officer or vigilante, stated a press release from Silicon Shut Down, a collective of students that “organize in West Palo Alto, East Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley against state-sanctioned violence (police brutality) and other forms of systemic oppression,” according to their website. www.stanforddaily.com/2015/01/19/students-shut-down-san-mateo-hayward-bridge-reclaim-mlk-day/

An outspoken opponent of the Obama administration’s controversial Common Core education reforms—new academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA) rolled out nationwide last year that have sparked protests among countless students, parents and teachers across Long Island and the country—Dimino was just one of several local school officials, elected officials, parents, and nonprofit leaders who railed out against the program at a rally last March at Comsewogue High School attended by hundreds of “Opt-Out” supporters.

UC Docs To Strike Doctors at all 10 University of California student health centers, including one at UC San Diego, announced Friday that they will hold a one-day unfair labor practices strike Tuesday.

Organizers said the walkout will mark the first time in 25 years that fully licensed doctors have gone on strike against a U.S. employer. It will also be the first strike in the 43-year history of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, according to the labor organization.

“Obviously, we’re disappointed that the union has chosen to go on strike,” said Shelly Meron, a spokeswoman for the UC president’s office.

The UAPD said doctors at the student health clinics unionized in 2013 and have been in negotiations on their first contract for over a year, during which they’ve filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against the UC system for what they consider to be illegal behavior at the bargaining table.

A “strike is the only way to compel UC to follow the laws that govern bargaining,” said UAPD President Dr. Stuart Bussey. “Unfortunatehttp://timesofsandiego.com/education/2015/01/23/docs-staging-historic-1st-strike-uc-student-health-centers/ly, UC has a history of disrespecting workers during negotiations, and we’re no exception to that.”

Reason vs Superstition–who will win the “democratic” vote? What is an atheist doing in the heart of Michigan’s Bible Belt?

Raising hell, for one thing.

Mitch Kahle, who moved to this lakefront community in western Michigan a year ago, has quickly made his presence felt.

He convinced Ottawa County to remove a religious sign from a county park, persuaded Grand Haven to turn a 48-foot cross on city land into an anchor, and got two school districts to stop a minister from continuing to hold lunchtime programs at schools.

On Tuesday, the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners will decide whether to return the sign bearing Psalm 19:1 to Hager Park near Jenison.

Far from turning the other cheek, conservative churches and their members have railed against Kahle at emotional City Council meetings and overflowing forums.

“I’ve been called every name in the book,” said Kahle.

He has received hate mail and death threats, and been cursed at by Christians.

From pulpits to social media, he has been compared to a terrorist, Hitler, vampire, demon and even the dark prince himself, Satan.

“How is it that a dirtbag can come into a community and cause so much controversy and destruction?” asked Rick Phillips, 59, a Spring Lake real estate broker who organized a rally to support the cross last year. “These carpetbaggers need to be driven from our community.”

NCAA Investigating 20 More Colleges In October, an independent report revealed that academic advisors at the University of North Carolina protected hundreds of athletes’ eligibility by funneling them through phony classes. That practice was sustained for 18 years.

According to a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the NCAA is investigating academic misconduct at least 17 additional Division I programs. According to the report, the investigations stand at different stages. Some are merely preliminary inquiries. Others are awaiting hearings with the Division I Committee on Infractions.

According to the report, the list of allegations include impermissible assistance from professors, academic advisors and individuals outside of the athletic department. Additionally, an NCAA official told The Chronicle that the NCAA also is investigating one Division II school and two Division III programs. The official would not name any of the schools.

Jonathan Duncan, the NCAA vice president for enforcement, told The Chronicle that he plans to bolster the academic integrity group the enforcement department created last year. Katherine Sulentic, a former academic advisor at the University of Colorado, chairs that group.

Michigan Coach to be paid $5.7 Million New football coach Jim Harbaugh’s seven-year contract with the Michigan, obtained by the Free Press on Friday, could be worth significantly more than $5.7million in annual average and is almost fully guaranteed.

Perhaps of most interest to Michigan fans is Harbaugh’s buyout. If Harbaugh were to leave early to, say, go back to the NFL, he would be responsible for the prorated amount of his signing bonus ($2 million). So if he were to leave after three years, he would owe four-sevenths of the $2 million ($1.14 million).

Harbaugh’s base salary starts at $500,000 per year, but he also receives $4.5 million in additional compensation. Both amounts are scheduled to increase by 10% after Year 3. Those new amounts are scheduled to be increased by another 10% after Year 5.

However, the contract also says that after Year 5, there will be an evaluation of Harbaugh’s performance and a review of his compensation compared with that of his “peers.”

If Harbaugh is compensated “less than his fair market value,” the parties agree to negotiate and adjust to bring Harbaugh up to fair market value. If such an increase would be greater than the scheduled 10% increase, then the market-value adjustment would take the place of the scheduled one.

Athletes who pretended to be students sue NCAA and College Two former University of North Carolina athletes have filed a lawsuit against the school and the NCAA in the wake of a far-reaching athletics scandal, alleging that they were deprived of a high-class education because of substandard courses.

Those Profitable Tests to Cost More than Projected The cost of testing Wisconsin students over the next two years will be at least $7.2 million more than originally estimated, state documents show.

The increased price tag comes at a time when states are preparing their students for new tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards and an effort by local GOP lawmakers to diminish the standards and offer schools a way to opt out of taking the tests picked by the state.

The Department of Public Instruction is asking for $17.9 million for the 2015-16 school year and $18.5 million for the 2016-17 school year to pay for administering the tests, according to DPI’s 2015-17 budget request. That is about $3.26 million and $3.96 million more, respectively, than what is appropriated already.

The GED in the Class War (you aren’t passing) A year after the GED exam underwent a massive overhaul — one that made it far more difficult but more in line with what’s expected of today’s high school grads — there has been a steep decline in people taking and passing the test.

Preliminary numbers from the GED Testing Service estimate that 90,000 people nationwide earned the General Educational Development diploma — a high school equivalency credential — in 2014. That’s down from 540,535 in 2013 and 401,388 in 2012.

Similar declines are happening in Michigan, where the number passing in 2014 was 1,472 for people in the general population, down from 13,651 in 2013 and 10,290 in 2012.

Letter to a Prospective Army Ranger–from and old Ranger Just who these groups are matters, but there’s an underlying point that it’s been too easy to overlook in recent years: ever since this country’s first Afghan War in the 1980s (that spurred the formation of the original al-Qaeda), our foreign and military policies have played a crucial role in creating those you will be sent to fight. Once you are in one of the three battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the chain-of-command will do its best to reduce global politics and the long-term good of the planet to the smallest of matters and replace them with the largest of tasks: boot polishing, perfectly made beds, tight shot groupings at the firing range, and your bonds with the Rangers to your right and left.

In such circumstances, it’s difficult — I know that well — but not impossible to keep in mind that your actions in the military involve far more than whatever’s in front of you or in your gun sights at any given moment. Our military operations around the world — and soon that will mean you — have produced all kinds of blowback. Thought about a certain way, I was being sent out in 2002 to respond to the blowback created by the first Afghan War and you’re about to be sent out to deal with the blowback created by my version of the second one.

Obamagogue Hurries from India to Kiss Some Wahhabi Ass President Barack Obama will shorten his trip to India and divert to Saudi Arabia, paying respects after the death of King Abdullah and meeting with the oil-rich nation’s new monarch, the White House said Saturday.

The scheduling shift, announced just before Obama left Washington, underscores the desert kingdom’s pivotal role in U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the military campaign against the Islamic State group.

Saudi Arabia’s status as one of Washington’s most important Arab allies has at times appeared to trump U.S. concerns about the terrorist funding that flows from the kingdom and about human rights abuses.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama would meet on Tuesday with King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and other officials to “offer his condolences on behalf of the American people.”http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/24/obama-cut-short-india-trip-visit-saudi-arabia/22269265/

Nick Turse: A Shadow War in 150 Countries During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries — roughly 70% of the nations on the planet — according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life — just 66 days into fiscal 2015 — America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans. Unlike the December debacle in Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny. In fact, aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to sell, and a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities, much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

“The command is at its absolute zenith. And it is indeed a golden age for special operations.” Those were the words of Army General Joseph Votel III, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, as he assumed command of SOCOM last August.

His rhetoric may have been high-flown, but it wasn’t hyperbole. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, including their numbers, their budget, their clout in Washington, and their place in the country’s popular imagination. The command has, for example, more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 today, including a jump of roughly 8,000 during the three-year tenure of recently retired SOCOM chief Admiral William McRaven.

Those numbers, impressive as they are, don’t give a full sense of the nature of the expansion and growing global reach of America’s most elite forces in these years. For that, a rundown of the acronym-ridden structure of the ever-expanding Special Operations Command is in order. The list may be mind-numbing, but there is no other way to fully grasp its scope. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175945/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_a_shadow_war_in_150_countries/

More US Forces To Train Syrian and other related Jihadists to fight Other Jihadists and Protect Our New Best Friend Forever, Assad. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is sending the first wave of about 100 US forces to the Middle East in the coming days to train and equip Syrian opposition fighters battling Islamic State militants.

The US troops, mostly special operations forces from the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), will begin arriving in countries outside Syria in the next few days, Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Friday.

“They’re going to … take a look at what’s there and prepare for further deployments,” according to Kirby, who last week said several hundred troops from foreign governments were also expected to train the Syrian fighters. The total number of US troops connected to the mission is expected to reach over 1,000 in the weeks ahead, including about 400 trainers and several hundred support forces.

The exact location of the training sites hasn’t been revealed, but Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host facilities where American forces could train members of the Syrian opposition, ostensibly to battle elements of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). However, given that the coalition governments have all proven their commitment to removing Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, some observers suspect an ulterior motive in the US-led plans.

In September last year, the United States, together with a loose coalition of Arab states, including Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, opened a bombing campaign in northern Syria against IS fighters. However, at the same time, the US has been reportedly arming members of the Syrian opposition, which has been engaged in a civil war against Assad’s forces. rt.com/usa/225863-pentagon-syria-rebels-train/

Who Lost the Ukraine? (and Yemen, and Syria, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan)?

A series of rocket attacks has left 30 people dead and many more injured in the city of Mariupol in east Ukraine.

Ukraine blamed pro-Russia rebels, but the separatists said Ukrainian forces were behind the attacks.

East Ukraine’s main rebel leader claimed he had begun an offensive against Mariupol, but later said he “will not storm the city”.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the rockets came from rebel-held areas.

But Alexander Zakharchenko, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said his forces had not carried out “active operations” near Mariupol until Saturday, Russian news agencies report.

However, he added that after Kiev blamed the rebels for the attack, he ordered his troops to “neutralise” the positions of Ukrainian troops east of the port city.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s security service has published what it claims are intercepted audio messages between separatist rebels speaking about the Mariupol attack.

Navy Fires another Philanderer –the Gitmo Commander The Navy fired the commanding officer of Naval Base Guantánamo Bay on Wednesday amid allegations of an extramarital affair, revealed following the death of the husband of the woman the base commander was allegedly seeing.

Capt. John Nettleton was relieved of command “due to a loss of confidence” by the head of Navy Region Southeast, Rear Adm. Mary Jackson, the Navy said. It declined to offer any additional details about the circumstances, citing an “ongoing” investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. POLITICO has learned, however, that investigators discovered the alleged affair between Nettleton and the woman after the body of her husband, Christopher Tur, was found last week by U.S. Coast Guardsmen in the waters of Guantánamo Bay. Tur, a civilian who worked on the naval base, had been reported missing by his wife, another civilian. read more: www.politico.com/story/2015/01/navy-fires-guantanamo-bay-commander-john-nettleton-114483.html#ixzz3PoQoeXKn

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Bonuses at Goldman Sachs! Angry politicians promised that the fatcat bankers who brought the world’s economy to its knees would pay the price for their reckless blunders.

But there was more fury yesterday as investment bank Goldman Sachs revealed that its staff will have earned £8.3billion in wages and perks.

It averages out as a massive £245,000 for each worker in the last 12 months.

But thousands of the top traders and deal makers, many of them based in Britain, pocketed much bigger amounts.

Some payouts run into seven figures at the company which was also slated for the large profits it turned over in the botched sell-off of the Royal Mail.

Wall Street Criminals at S and P Fined, not Jailed, again The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday a $58 million settlement with storied ratings agency Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, which the government accused of fraudulent activity involving commercial mortgage bonds.

Under terms of the settlement, S&P will pay $58 million in federal penalties, as well as $12 million to settle complaints with the New York Attorney General and $7 million with the Massachusetts Attorney General.

“These enforcement actions, our first-ever against a major ratings firm, reflect our commitment to aggressively policing the integrity and transparency of the credit ratings process,”Andrew J. Ceresney, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said in a statement Wednesday.

At issue were ratings given by S&P to commercial mortgage-backed securities, which are pools of commercial mortgages that are bundled together and sold to investors as a mortgage bond. The SEC accused S&P of misrepresenting in public the methodology it actually used to derive its rating.

The Poisoned Flint Michigan Water Supply In a city where residents have felt under siege for years — from crime, bad press and an emergency manager some feel forced upon them — the newest threat pours from kitchen spigots and showerheads.

No Indictments for SWAT Team that Flashbanged this baby (no med expenses either) a state grand jury declined to return an indictment.

The incident, which severely injured a 1-year-old child, occurred in May when the Habersham County Special Response Team conducted a drug raid in Cornelia. The grand jury began hearing the case late last month.

“Federal authorities have been participating in the investigation of this terrible incident, and now that a state grand jury has declined to return an indictment, we will review the matter for possible federal charges,” said U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Sally Quillian Yates.

The police officers involved were called baby killers and received threats following the incident, Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell said at the time.

The SWAT team, made up of six or seven officers from the sheriff’s department and the Cornelia Police Department, entered the Cornelia residence of Wanis Thonetheva on the morning of May 28.

A confidential informant hours earlier had purchased methamphetamine at the house, the sheriff said.

Because Thonetheva had a previous weapons charge, officers were issued a “no-knock warrant” for the residence, Terrell said.

When the SWAT team hit the home’s front door with a battering ram, it resisted as if something was up against it, the sheriff said, so one of the officers threw the flash-bang grenade inside the residence.

About that popular fascist movement rising in Germany 1. What is the origin of the Pegida movement, how was it born? What is the meaning of the fact it is developing in Dresden, a war-torn city that is socialist/stalinist. Continuity with History?

Pegida started around 13 Weeks ago with marches of several thousand people, but these marches grew very quickly. There are obviously fascist and right-wing extremists in this movement, but they managed to attract many “ordinary” people with right-wing tendencies from the middle class and even from the lower classes. It is actually a right-wing grass-roots movement, that was organized through the internet and social network sites – and it grew steadily by not only regional, but also countrywide mobilizations.

During the rallies in Dresden, there were many people from other cities of Germany as well. The new aspect is the insistence of non-violence” during the marches, which stands in stark contrast to the usual actions of the viciously brutal German fascist movement. Take the violent “anti-islam” demonstration of fascist hooligans in Cologne last October as an example, where the fascists started to hunt for immigrants. We should also not forget the German fascist terrorist organisation NSU (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund), that was uncovered just three years ago – and whose members are responsible for at least 8 killings of immigrants. Even now, there is a spike in attacks on immigrants and leftwingers, but this violence did not occur during the marches and demonstrations of Pegida. zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-origin-of-the-pegida-movement/

Solidarity for Never

After NEA Demanded His Resignation and NEA’s prezzie Eskelsen gave him a big hug–Arne’s still there thrashing around On Monday, I laid out core ideas for a law that would ensure real opportunity, one that must expand support and funding for schools and teachers. It must expand access to quality preschool. It must help to modernize teaching, through improved supports and preparation. And it must continue to enable parents, educators and communities to know how much progress students are making — and ensure that where students are falling behind, and where schools fail students year after year, action will be taken.

Meeting in Secret, Led by the AFT-AFL-CIO, same old hacks continue Detroit School False Hope Shell Game A 1-month-old coalition that is trying to fix problems around education in Detroit announced today that it added five members and launched a website and Facebook page.

It also heard recently from two high-profile officials — Gov. Rick Snyder and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan — and formed subcommittees around issues such as finance and academics, though most details of its work remain under wraps.

The new steering committee members add even more professional diversity to the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren, said co-chair Dave Hecker. The group now has 36 education, religious, civic, philanthropic and business leaders.

The coalition was formed in December. Members will create a list of suggested education reforms by the end of March and present them to public officials and lawmakers. …

So far, coalition meetings have been closed except to members and invited guests. Members are asked to keep what happens at them confidential. No public meetings have been scheduled yet.

What About those 28 pages of the 9/11 Report? Those redacted pages from the congressional investigation into the attacks specifically focus on the role of foreign governments in the al Qaeda plot.

“They primarily deal with who financed 9/11, and they point a strong finger at Saudi Arabia,” former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida told CNN’s Michael Smercornish over the weekend. He co-chaired the panel that released the report in 2002.

Graham, along with Rep. Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) and Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) will hold a news conference Wednesday asking Obama to declassify those remaining pages of the 832-page 9/11 report.

In the months after 9/11, the House and the Senate convened joint hearings and produced the massive report. But the 28 pages were classified by then-President George W. Bush.

The government feared releasing them “could adversely affect ongoing counterterrorism efforts,” according to a letter from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Terry Strada, whose husband died in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said 9/11 families like hers have been pushing for the release for 13 years. The families say Obama personally promised he would release those redacted pages — but it hasn’t happened.

Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months for linking hacked material In a rebuke to a legion of online supporters and what the journalist and one-time member of Anonymous called a “dangerous precedent”, Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison by a federal judge in Dallas on Thursday.

Brown’s backers from across the web had hoped he would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for what they insist was “merely linking to hacked material”. But the 33-year-old, who was once considered something of a spokesman for the Anonymous movement, will face more than twice that sentence. The judge also ordered him to pay more than $890,000 in restitution and fines.

In a statement released after his sentencing, Brown was sarcastically upbeat: “Good news!” he wrote. “The US government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex.”

Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Free Barrett Brown campaign, whom Brown personally singled out for thanks in his pre-sentencing statement, told the Guardian that his first reaction was that the judge had got it wrong. “I was shocked and disappointed,” he said.

Papal Fanatic Declares: “No Hard Partying at the Arisen Party” (can they bring the kids?) Pope Francis is warning his new cardinals to keep the partying to a minimum — and keep their egos in check — when they are formally elevated at a Vatican ceremony next month.

In a letter written to the 20 new princes of the church published Friday in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Francis warned the cardinals to avoid the type of ostentatious festivities that “stun worse than grappa on an empty stomach.”

Traditionally, new cardinals are feted with lavish parties, often funded by well-meaning parishioners, in Rome after the ceremony where they receive their red hats. Francis, known for his personal simplicity and disdain for anything fancy, said it was perfectly fine to celebrate but urged his new cardinals to accept a party “with humility.” news.yahoo.com/pope-cardinals-just-no-212712956.html

Nationalism and Money + Woman Over Islam? The religious leader of the Islamic Center of America — a landmark religious institution in metro Detroit that’s one of Michigan’s biggest mosques — said Friday he would resign unless the board of trustees dissolves.

The dramatic announcement by Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini to his packed congregation was met by cries of support from members pleading for him to stay and reflects an intense debate in one of the most notable mosques in the U.S. over finances, ethnicity, and what is permissible under Islam. Al-Qazwini said he was the victim of anti-Iraqi racism from some board members of Lebanese descent, calling upon supporters to back him at a board meeting on Sunday.

Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini’s opponents have accused him of using donations to the mosque for family projects and of having an illicit relationship, charges he strongly denies.

Planet Improves with One Less Monarch and fanatic Wahhabi (and how about his daughters?) King Abdullah, 90, who died early Friday morning, is being hailed as a reformer, despite condoning human rights abuses and forwarding only very measured efforts to promote democracy in his oil-rich nation.

One of the most scrutinized aspects of the Saudi Arabia’s rights’ record is its so-called “male guardianship system,” women are not allowed to travel, obtain a passport, marry, or continue their education without the approval of a male relative.

The King’s own daughters are hardly an exception to the harsh rule. Four of his daughters claim that the are being forcibly held in a dilapidated palace with little in the way of food and water. “Our father said that we had no way out,” Sahar Al Saud, 42, wrote in an email to the British broadcast network Channel 4, “And that after his death our brothers will continue detaining us.”

“We are just an example of so many families, of what so many women, go through. Just a tiny, tiny example,” the princess who once enjoyed international skiing and shopping trips said.